(Barbados Nation) It may read like a soap opera but a case involving a Bajan who tried to kill her best friend who was carrying her philandering husband’s baby can end up making legal history in the United States.
With right wing Republicans, Tea Party members and a conservative think tank, the Cato Institute, lining up behind Carol-Ann Bond, a Barbadian who lived for years in Pennsylvania but is now in a federal prison in West Virginia for using chemicals in an attempt to murder Mylandra Haynes, another Barbadian, the US Supreme Court is hearing Bond’s constitutional challenge to a legal procedure that is pitting some of the nation’s best legal brains against each other.
As Paul D. Clement, a former US Solicitor-General sees it, federal prosecutors in Philadelphia used a “sledgehammer” to send the Bajan to prison under an anti-terrorism law designed to punish international criminals, not housewives. Stated simply, Bond and her backers are contending that she shouldn’t have been tried in federal court but should have been convicted in a state court.
At the heart of the dispute is the 10th Amendment to the United States’ constitution which holds that any power not given to the federal government should be set aside for the states or the people.Stephen McAllister, the current solicitor-General, disagrees.
Conviction should stand
“Although [the Bajan] may not be a terrorist and did not, for example, send toxic chemicals through the mail,” the conviction should stand because throwing it out would make it difficult to prosecute future terrorists, he argued.
The contentious case began at least six years ago when Bond, a highly trained microbiologist found out that her bosom pal, Haynes, was pregnant. At first, the news was greeted with elation because the woman wanted the best for her friend. But things turned sour when she discovered that her husband, Clifford Bond, was sleeping with Haynes and had impregnated her.
It was then that Bond, who didn’t have any children, went berserk allegedly harassing Haynes, according to court documents. To put it succinctly, it became a case of “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”.
“I [am] going to make your life a living hell,” Bond is said to have warned Haynes in a telephone call.
“Dead people will visit you,” she told the pregnant woman.
Those threats led to Bond’s conviction on a minor charge of harassment in 2005. But the Bajan couldn’t contain her anger. Between November 2006 and June in 2007, she tried and failed on at least 20 occasions to poison Haynes.
She even stole an arsenic-based chemical from her employer, turned to the Internet, and ordered potassium dichromate, a corrosive substance that can be lethal.
Chemicals spread all over
By then, of course, Haynes had given birth to a daughter, and Bond stepped up the campaign the court heard. She spread the chemicals on the door knob of Haynes’ home, on the front door, mailbox and car, hoping that by touching the powder, the woman would die or be injured. However, luck was on Haynes’s side and when she saw the chemicals, she reported the matter to the local police who failed to act and then to the postal service which began an investigation and were able to compile incriminating evidence.
The upshot? Bond was convicted in 2008, sent to prison for six years, slapped with five years of supervised probation, fined US$2 000 and ordered to pay US$10 000 in restitution.
But herein lies the legal rub. If she had been brought up on Pennsylvania state charges and found guilty, she would have been given a lighter jail sentence of between three to 25 months.
That’s when Bond took her cause to a federal appeals court, insisting that the federal law under which she was prosecuted “exceeded the federal government’s enumerated powers, violated bedrock federalism principles guaranteed under the 10th Amendment and impermissibly criminalized conduct that lacked any nexus in a legitimate federal interest.”
It’s that argument that has attracted conservative legal support.
But the Appeals court didn’t hear the case, ruling that the Bajan didn’t have “standing” to challenge her conviction and sentence on the grounds that only states can challenge the “feds” under the 10th Amendment.
It’s that issue which the Supreme Court must now settle.
Interestingly, through all of her troubles, she remained married to her husband.