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Drug defendant no stranger to court system
By adamg on Wed, 12/02/2009 - 2:21pm
But this time not because of past arrests. A probation worker at Charlestown District Court was arrested there yesterday on charges she helped her boyfriend sell OxyContin out of their East Boston apartment.
Michelle Kelly, 26, was arraigned this morning on a charge of distributing OxyContin within 1,000 feet of a school and 100 feet of a park, according to the Suffolk County District Attorney's office. She had bail set at $1,000.
Her boyfriend, Paul J. Doherty, 28, was arraigned yesterday on 12 counts of distributing OxyContin and one count of trafficking in more than 14 grams of the drug, the DA's office says. He was ordered held in lieu of $250,000 bail.
Prosecutors say that Doherty sold about 100 OxyContin tablets to undercover State troopers on several occasions over the last half of 2008 - and charge Kelly was present for many of the deals at their Lexington Street residence. The DA's office says the charge against Kelly stems from a Dec. 22 incident in which Kelly sold an undercover two tablets of OxyContin because Doherty was not home.
Innocent, etc.
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Comments
I heard a statistic
on WBUR that 93% (I think that was the number -- definitely in the 90s) of property in Boston is within 1000 feet of a school. Which sounds about right; 1000 feet is about a fifth of a mile, and most of us can quickly walk to at least one school. Shouldn't the charge be tweaked somehow to require that said drug sale actually involved minors and/or their immediate environment? I assume something along those lines is why the charge exists. If I sell drugs inside my house, is it somehow worse since there's a school in the neighborhood?
An active school?
I find that statistic hard to believe. Perhaps within 1000' of a building that used to be a school...
I find it hard to believe we'd spend that much money on busing if most of the children could be walking instead.
I'm not sure what counts though
I'm thinking the law might count anything that's licensed to provide educational services to kids. So Head Starts, afterschools, maybe even home daycares.
Did you mention busing?
Let's keep this a drug discussion, shall we? :-)
That having been said, if you combine public schools, private schools and parochial schools, yeah, I bet you'd find much of the city is within a 1,000-foot zone, excepting maybe some of the more isolated, rural areas, such as up here along the ridges on the Roslindale/Hyde Park line, where one of the schools in our "walk" zone would have required the kidlet to walk uphill both ways to get to school (a fact which, yes, you longtimers may recognize as one I never get tired of citing).
school zone
the law defines school zone to include not only secondary schools etc but playgrounds and parks, regardless of whether they are attached to a school.