A woman who walked away from a misdemeanor jail sentence in Michigan more than 35 years ago, only to find herself having to pay for the minor crime twice more, completed her five-week stay in a San Diego jail Friday.
It was not the first time that Jamie Lewis, 60, was arrested for the 1977 larceny. She spent time in jail in Nevada in 1996, once again because police found the old Michigan arrest warrant but did not connect it with a judge’s 1982 decision that she had already paid her debt to society. She also has a heroin arrest on record in San Diego in 1980, according to Fox5 San Diego.
Lewis proved that she had changed her name, from Judy Lynn Hayman, one year after being confronted with the 1982 felony arrest warrant in Michigan.
Lewis was arrested at her Balboa Park-area home Feb. 3 and has been in a San Diego jail ever since. (For background on her initial apprehension, see the video above.)
Prosecutors from the San Diego County District Attorney’s dismissed a fugitive complaint against her Friday, clearing the way for her release.
Michigan corrections officials said Lewis, then named Hayman, pleaded guilty in June 1976 to a misdemeanor charge of attempted larceny in a building for trying to steal clothes from a Detroit-area store.
She was sentenced to serve between 16 months and two years in custody.
Ten months later, she walked away from the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility. But she went back to Michigan in 1982 to take care of the outstanding felony warrant for the escape and was given credit for time served, according to her attorney, Lisa Damiani.
Hayman legally changed her name to Jamie Lewis in 1983, and in 1996, was arrested under that name in Nevada. Authorities determined her attempted larceny sentence had been suspended, and she was freed from custody, according to Damiani.
The local judge on Friday was shown that the latter part of Lewis’s court file was located and her record had been corrected by Michigan authorities to show that Hayman had done her time in custody, and Lewis is not wanted for any crime there.
– City News Service
