Judge: Prisoner’s love letter mix-up was his own fault

A prisoner from Springfield who made the marriage-ending mistake of putting his wife’s address onto a steamy love letter he wrote to his mistress did not get any sympathy from a judge recently.

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Judge: Prisoner’s love letter mix-up was his own fault By ERIC FRANCIS CORRESPONDENT | January 25,2016 Email Article Print Article A prisoner from Springfield who made the marriage-ending mistake of putting his wife’s address onto a steamy love letter he wrote to his mistress did not get any sympathy from a judge recently. Inmate Terrick Craft thought a judge should order his (now ex) wife to keep putting money into his commissary account just because he doesn’t think she should have opened the envelope in the first place. But U.S. District Court Judge Geoffrey Crawford disagreed. “(He) has no legal right to sue for monetary gifts which his wife no longer makes ... gifts are voluntary ... the giver may stop giving whenever he or she chooses,” Crawford wrote Wednesday as he shot down the second of two federal lawsuits (the first was against the post office) that were filed in October by Craft. Craft is currently at the Concord State Prison in New Hampshire serving an 8-to-15-year sentence that he received for, among other things, firing a gun multiple times in the main intersection in downtown Springfield in broad daylight on July 9, 2012, over a drug dispute. In his handwritten civil complaint, Craft referred to himself and his ex-wife, Tracey Craft, in the third person, freely admitting that he was “having an affair on the defendant” and adding that in December of 2014 he was trying to send the letter to his mistress “explaining his feelings and what (he) wished to do to his mistress sexually.” Craft said that a few days later he realized that something had gone horribly wrong when his wife and kids showed up for a jailhouse visit. “It was obvious by the bags (around her eyes) and the redness that the defendant had been crying,” Craft explained to the court. Craft said his wife asked him if there was anything he wanted to tell her and when he pressed her to clarify what she was upset about she responded by pulling out his explicit letter. In his lawsuit, Craft claims he started off by placing the letter “A” — his girlfriend’s first initial — on the envelope before he made the first slip-up, transposing his wife’s last name “Clark,” before putting his girlfriend’s street address, which is in a neighboring town, and then concluding it with “Springfield, Vermont 05156.” Nevertheless, despite his addressing error, Clark said he was incensed both that the letter carrier went ahead and delivered the letter to his house and that his wife opened it once it got there. “It should have been returned (by) the mail carrier unopened,” Craft wrote, adding that he felt his wife must have known the letter “was not for her, as well as anyone else in the house, being as though nobody’s name starts with an ‘A.’ By opening the letter the defendant showed no regard for the plaintiff or addressee’s right to privacy nor the law,” Craft argued. Craft noted that, before his letter landed in her lap, his wife had been vowing to wait until 2027 if necessary to have him back, and since she’d been putting a hundred dollars into his jail account every two weeks he argued that “if it had not been for the letter...” she would have likely continued to do so. Therefore, he asked the federal court to order her to pay him $10,000 as punishment for having opened the ambiguously addressed envelope. As proof of his change of fortune, Craft provided the court with records showing that as of December he had only $5.50 in his commissary account and that during the previous six months his average monthly balance had been less than $15, most of it earnings from a prison job assignment, a big drop from the $200 a month his then-wife had been reliably providing before his marriage was upended. Crawford rapidly dispensed with all of Craft’s arguments. “The facts support no possible cause of action. (This case) is entirely frivolous,” Crawford said. “(Craft) mailed a letter that arrived at his wife’s address addressed to an individual with her last name and without a full first name. His wife opened the envelope. She did not invade (his) privacy, as she had no way of knowing that she did not have his consent in opening a letter that was mailed to her house, was partially addressed to her, and had no other obvious intended recipient.”