The Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office is asking that the bond be revoked for a defendant who twice fled the courthouse after he failed court-ordered drug tests.
The DA’s motion was filed after WWL-TV revealed that defendant Craig Howard, 26, successfully escaped court on July 19 despite wearing an electronic ankle monitor that had been ordered as a condition of his release on bail.
The monitoring company – Assured Supervision Accountability Program, or ASAP – tracked Howard to the Home Depot on Earhart Boulevard, where he grabbed a bolt cutter from the shelf and removed the device. ASAP alerted Criminal Court Judge Ben Willard to Howard’s escape, but Willard declined to issue an arrest warrant, leaving ASAP agents and police powerless to act.
Willard issued a bench warrant for Howard later that day, but it was too late. Howard fled the courthouse after testing positive for opiates in a drug screening ordered by Willard.
Willard noted that the ankle monitor had been ordered previously by a magistrate commissioner as a condition of his $10,000 bail before the case was allotted to him. Nevertheless, Willard has drawn criticism for not acting more quickly to prevent Howard from successfully cutting off the bracelet and disappearing.
“This is frustrating in that this is not a failure of the electronic monitor. It's a failure of the judge,” said Rafael Goyeneche, president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, a non-profit criminal justice watchdog group. “This is something that was totally preventable.”
There's an added twist in Howard's case. After ASAP reported Howard's violation, and notified police of the new crime – tampering with electronic monitoring equipment, a misdemeanor – Howard returned to Willard's court on his own on July 27, but suffered no consequences. He was ordered to return to court Aug. 8, which he did, but he failed another drug test, court records show.
And again, he fled the courthouse.
“We saw history repeat itself,” Goyeneche said. “He goes down for the drug test and then leaves the building. And this time there's no way to track him.”
In the motion to revoke bond, prosecutors are now asking that Howard “be held without bail pursuant to law given that the defendant poses an imminent danger to any other person or the community.”