By Jean Marbella
The Baltimore Sun
Talk about America’s Least Wanted.
Willie Parker may be a desperado, but not exactly a dangerous one.
“We didn’t put all our tactical gear on and bust down the door or anything,” said Deputy U.S. Marshal Brandon Taylor, who helped bring Parker in. “We didn’t put him in handcuffs.”
No, at 81, and, as one news account described him, half “paralyzed and twisted by a stroke,” Parker didn’t have another escape in him.
Forty-three years ago, he might have escaped from a prison camp on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, but by last week, when he was found in North Carolina, it was pretty much all he could do to get out of bed, let his home health nurse put some pants on over the boxers he was wearing and be escorted to jail.
The law finally caught up with Willie Parker, but why it even bothered is a mystery. He’ll have to go before a judge for an extradition hearing and could be brought back here to serve the 29 years he apparently owes the state on a 1950s-era armed-robbery charge.
Seems like someone should just strap one of those monitoring devices on his ankle and save everyone a lot of trouble.
Sgt. Arthur Betts, a spokesman for the Maryland State Police, said it’s not up to the police to decide who will or won’t be arrested, if there’s an outstanding warrant for them. While refusing to give too many details on the pursuit of Parker, he said that the state police received information on his whereabouts, contacted the Department of Corrections about the details of his imprisonment and escape and then asked officials in North Carolina to arrest him.
“His was one of many outstanding warrants,” Betts said. “He wasn’t singled out in any way.”
Betts said the state police had 84 “re-take” warrants as of January - for people wanted for escaping prison or for parole violations - and as of earlier this month had closed out 12 of them.
DOC spokesman Mark Vernarelli said it was quite the research project for the department’s “Commitment Office” to retrieve Parker’s records, which he notes were “written or typed on a typewriter eight governors ago,” long before the advent of computerized recordkeeping.
Parker is currently incarcerated at the Sampson County, N.C., jail until a decision is made on whether he will be extradited to Maryland to finish up his self-shortened prison term. His current jailers don’t seem too enthusiastic about keeping the frail prisoner.
“If we had to keep this guy in custody, it’ll probably cost us $5,000 a month,” Kemely Pickett of the Sampson County jail told The Sun last week. He also promised to charge Maryland for the medical bills Parker incurs during his stay there.
A reporter from The Fayetteville Observer described a pathetic scene at the jail, where Parker limped around in orthopedic shoes, his right arm curled against his body. Guards apparently address him as “Mr. Parker,” and a much younger inmate had to help him to a seat in the common area.
But law enforcement officers make no apologies for his arrest.
“The law is the law,” said Taylor, who works out of the eastern North Carolina district of the U.S. Marshals Service. “Everybody has to follow it.”
Parker’s woes date back to an arrest and conviction for armed robbery, for which he was sentenced to 40 years in 1953.
Parker told the Fayetteville paper that he still remembers the name of the judge who sentenced him to 40 years for armed robbery. “Judge Joseph L. Carter, never forget that,” he said.
Carter died in 1991, according to an obituary in The Sun, but not before he had “won a reputation for tough sentencing during 22 years on the old Supreme Bench of Baltimore City.”
“A 20-year sentence Judge Carter gave to a man convicted of a $47 street robbery was termed ‘shocking’ in its harshness by a federal appellate judge in a 1967 ruling that nonetheless upheld the punishment,” the obit went on to say.
Parker apparently agrees with Carter’s reputation. He was paroled in 1961, but arrested again two years later, this time on a drug charge, and sent back to prison to serve out the remaining years of his original sentence. In 1965, he told The Sun last week, he felt like he’d served enough time, and escaped from the prison camp on the Eastern Shore.
From there, he traveled across the country, assuming different names and getting into various troubles with the law, even serving time in a prison in Washington state during the 1970s.
“I know his history,” Taylor said. “He was not a nice guy.”
Parker claims he’s hasn’t gotten into any trouble since his last imprisonment. Now he’ll have to decide whether to fight or waive extradition to Maryland, and then authorities here will determine what to do with the “old gentleman,” as Betts delicately refers to him.
What happens next in the saga of Parker remains to be seen. At this point, given the minimal threat he poses, it seems like Parker should be the subject of a country song - imagine, our own “Poncho & Lefty” - rather than an inmate in prison.
“I’m sure the rationale that [police] use is it’s not up to them, once there’s a warrant out,” said Andrew Levy, a Baltimore attorney who teaches criminal law at the University of Maryland Law School. “It has to be a zero-tolerance issue. They at least have to be seen to be taking it through the normal process. But it’s hard to believe any judge at this stage will incarcerate him.”
Copyright 2008 The Baltimore Sun