Freed inmate must go back to Tuttle hell

2-4-2010 Florida:

Vindication gets Eduardo Galego out of prison and back into the netherworld where Miami-Dade sequesters sex offenders.

The Third District Court of Appeal reversed Galego's 2008 probation revocation last week. The three-judge panel decided that a sick diabetic checking himself into a hospital emergency room was not the same as a convict willfully jumping probation.

The decision saved Galego from 18 more years of hard time. He figures to be released Thursday morning.

But out of prison into what?

``It's a peculiar feeling,'' admitted Valerie Jonas, the assistant Miami-Dade public defender who convinced the appeal court to undo the 2008 revocation. The appeal court victory essentially forces Galego back into the bowels of the Julia Tuttle Causeway, back into the same conditions -- without electricity, water or toilets -- that Jonas had argued were ``deleterious to diabetics' health.''

NO ALTERNATIVE

Jonas said Wednesday that Galego, desite his prescribed regime of medicines, including insulin that requires refrigeration, has no money for rent, no relatives outside the restricted areas and no legal alternative to the squalid camp under the Tuttle.

What Jonas called her ``Pyrrhic victory'' came just as Miami-Dade County's new sex offender ordinance took effect on Monday, preempting the Draconian residency restrictions passed by many Miami-Dade cities that essentially banned sex offenders from most of the county's affordable housing. But it is unclear that a new ordinance maintaining a 2,500-foot residency restriction around schools will provide enough affordable housing to fix what has become an international embarrassment along the Tuttle Causeway.

The Miami-Dade Housing Trust has found housing for a number of Tuttle residents, but other offenders just out of prison are still finding their way to the bridge settlement.

Gretl Plessinger of the Florida Department of Corrections said Wednesday that the agency's probation officers no longer direct sex offenders to the Tuttle. ``We don't tell them to go there, but if they tell us that's where they want to go, that's what we do,'' she said. ``It really should be a last resort.''

PLEA DEAL

For Galego, it's the only resort. Galego, 43, had spent five years in prison awaiting trial on charges he had sexually assaulted a 17-year-old. In 2006, he took a plea deal -- time served with seven years probation.

But probation meant he was consigned to the Tuttle, one of the few areas in urban Miami-Dade County outside the sex-offender restriction zones.

On Jan. 24, 2008, Galego missed his 10 p.m. curfew. He claimed to have been in the throes of a diabetic episode.

``Substantial uncontroverted lay, medical and documentary evidence established that he missed curfew because he had become sick that day with acute complications of diabetes mellitus, leading to emergency intervention at the hospital,'' Jonas argued in an appeal that included supporting testimony from Dr. Joe Greer, chief of gastroenterology at Mercy Hospital and assistant dean of academic affairs at the College of Medicine at Florida International University.

His probation officer, however, acted on the assumption that Galego was drunk and partying, not sick.

With no more evidence than the officer's claim that he had heard music in the background when Galego had called in earlier that afternoon, the probation was revoked.

Such tough treatment did nothing to disprove allegations around the courthouse that prosecutors offer lenient sentences attached to long probationary periods to accused sex offenders with difficult-to-try cases -- with the tacit understanding that probation officers will use any excuse to bounce the defendants back to prison.

But in this case, the appeal panel insisted that ``it is the state's burden to prove, by the greater weight of the evidence, that a probation violation is a willful and substantial one. However, rather than provide substantial and competent evidence to prove its case, here the state relied on sheer conjecture.''

The decision gave Galego, a Cuban immigrant with no money, no job, no work permit, no home, an improbable legal victory.

And his ticket back to the Tuttle. ..Source.. FRED GRIMM