By Maddie Hanna
Concord Monitor
MERRIMACK, N.H. — The former Monitor accountant who embezzled $200,000 from the newspaper has been granted permission by a Merrimack County judge to serve out her sentence at home, her lawyer said.
Prison officials still have to approve Lisa Grass’s request for administrative home confinement, which Grass told the court would allow her to receive better medical care. She has degenerative joint disease and spinal stenosis, according to court filings, and incarceration has been “agonizing for her,” her lawyer, Mark Sisti, wrote in a motion requesting the home confinement.
The state had objected to the request, noting that Grass had received a 1[1/2]- to 15-year sentence after pleading guilty last year to one count of theft by unauthorized taking.
She began serving that sentence in February at the state women’s prison in Goffstown, and “to be placed on home confinement at this juncture sends the wrong message to both Ms. Grass and the community,” Lisa Drescher, a prosecutor with the Hillsborough County Attorney’s Office, wrote in court filings.
Sisti said a judge approved Grass’s request during a hearing Wednesday in Merrimack County Superior Court. “She is very, very happy with the outcome,” he said yesterday.
Grass was granted work release in July and transferred to the Shea Farm halfway house. She will be there until the local parole office reviews her proposed living arrangements and prison officials approve the plan, according to prison spokesman Jeff Lyons.
If released on home confinement, Grass will be required to wear an ankle bracelet with GPS monitoring and comply with a schedule. “She’ll still be considered an inmate,” Lyons said, and if she violated the terms of her confinement, she would go back to prison rather than before a parole board.
Grass had been living in Maine before beginning her prison sentence, but Sisti said that if she receives home confinement she will “be in the area,” living with family.
Grass was also ordered to pay $200,000 restitution to the Monitor when she pleaded guilty to the embezzlement. In a May letter requesting the home confinement, she said she hoped to start a cake decorating business, which she said would allow her to pay back the Monitor more quickly. In prison, she made $2 a day, 10 percent of which went to the Monitor, she wrote.
Grass also said in her letter that she could pay the Monitor $200 a month if granted home confinement and after a year would increase her payments to 30 percent of her income.
Sisti said yesterday that the plan was her proposal, not a court order.
Drescher wasn’t available for comment yesterday.
Copyright 2010 Concord Monitor/Sunday Monitor