Woman held after rehab washout

Charged with holding up of the Springfield Rite Aid pharmacy in February, a Bellows Falls woman washed out of a drug treatment program and was returned to jail last week despite her plea to be allowed to go home to care for her children.
http://www.rutlandherald.com/article/20150413/THISJUSTIN/704139959

Woman held after rehab washout By ERIC FRANCIS CORRESPONDENT | April 13,2015 WHITE RIVER JUNCTION — Charged with holding up of the Springfield Rite Aid pharmacy in February, a Bellows Falls woman washed out of a drug treatment program and was returned to jail last week despite her plea to be allowed to go home to care for her children. Mary Graves, 29, had been allowed, over the objection of prosecutors, to enroll in the Valley Vista facility in Bradford late last month, but she returned to the courthouse in White River Junction after only nine days, having been abruptly “administratively discharged” from the program. Graves’ public defender, attorney Mike Shane, said his client’s explanation for the “low positive” drug test that got her dismissed from Valley Vista was that someone else was passing around a soda that had been laced with buprenorphine and she’d was unaware of the contents when she took a sip from that can. Graves showed up of her own accord at the courthouse the morning after her discharge, as required by her pretrial release conditions, and Shane urged the court to let her return home with her fiancé who has been caring for her 2-year-old child since her arrest. “Ms. Graves has two young children and she very much wants to be part of their lives,” Shane told the court. Windsor County Deputy State’s Attorney Rhonda Sheffield objected to what she characterized as an effort to reward Graves despite her having failed to complete residential treatment. Sheffield cited Graves’ criminal record, which stretches back more than a decade and includes a misdemeanor heroin possession conviction a year ago in Windham County and multiple violations of probation and release conditions. Graves was arrested within hours of the Feb. 23 robbery in which she is accused of waving a “dirty” hypodermic needle at a store clerk, threatening to infect the worker before getting away with approximately $260 in cash from the register. Graves pleaded innocent the next day to a felony count of armed robbery and was initially ordered held for lack of $25,000 bail. “There’s a lot of hearsay going around as to why she is no longer in that program, but the point is she is not,” Judge Karen Carroll said from the bench last week as she ordered the $25,000 bail reinstated, noting, “In the court’s mind, she’s essentially back where she was at the time the court required the bail.”