Maryland prison contraband scheme ends with 15 guilty pleas
BALTIMORE– Fifteen people have pleaded guilty for their roles in a Maryland prison smuggling scheme that used drones to smuggle drugs, cellphones and other items into a state prison, the state's attorney general announced.
The guilty pleas came seven months after Attorney General Anthony Brown first announced that a correctional officer and civilians had been indicted on charges that they assisted inmates in illegal activities at the Roxbury Correctional Institution in Hagerstown, Maryland.
“Safety is as important in our correctional facilities as it is for the public in our neighborhoods and communities,” Brown said in a news release this week. “This painstaking investigation and subsequent convictions send a clear message that we will not tolerate crime or corruption. within our correctional facilities, which disrupts the goals of rehabilitation.”
An investigation began in April 2022, after authorities recovered drugs and other contraband smuggled into the prison after an inmate returned to the prison after a hospital visit.
The AG's investigative team “uncovered a complex web of conspiracies aimed at smuggling drugs and other contraband into RCI through an employee, drones and outside citizens recruited through social media,” the press release said.
Last month, Brown announced additional charges against one of the RCI inmates, Jose Miguel Tapia. Tapia created a false court commitment document and posed as a representative of a state attorney general's office in an effort to secure his unlawful early release from prison, the attorney general said.
The forged document, printed with the seal of the court clerk, was intended to grant Tapia 449 days of credit for time served against his sentence in an effort to get him released early, Brown said.
From his jail cell, Tapia electronically faxed the false warrant to the clerk of the Baltimore City Circuit Court and, assuming the identity of a representative of the district attorney's office, called the clerk's office to request that it be processed, the news said. Edition.
The registry acknowledged that the commitment was false, the attorney general's office said. Tapia was sentenced to an additional fourteen years.