A former correctional officer was sentenced Monday to two years in prison after she pleaded guilty to supplying drugs and a cell phone to an inmate at the Baltimore City Detention Center.
Lynae Chapman, 21, was convicted of six charges, including conspiracy to distribute marijuana and professional misconduct in office. She was charged in October after authorities searched the cell of Ray Lee and found drugs and a cell phone that contained her DNA, according to the plea agreement read in court.
Chapman, who has a 2-year-old child, did not speak during Monday's hearing but was warned by Judge Barry G. Williams not to violate the terms of her supervised probation after she is released. Williams sentenced Chapman to 10 years in prison, with all but eight suspended, and said she will serve her entire term if she so much as misses one meeting with her probation officer.
"You have two choices. You can continue to serve the sentence and put this behind you, or you can leave here and continue down the same path you are going," Williams said. "Really, everything that you do is up to you. I hope to see you on the streets in a couple of years, and you and your child are doing well."
Warren Brown, Chapman's attorney, described his client as being a good person who fell in love with the wrong man. Authorities say Lee is a member of the prison-based Black Guerrilla Family, a gang targeted in recent years by federal investigators. Authorities have accused the BGF of corrupting corrections officers and attempting to take over the city's lucrative drug markets.
Starting in September 2009, Chapman smuggled drugs into the jail and provided Lee with a cell phone from Radio Shack, prosecutors said.
"She's one of the many that have been caught up with these guys. These guys just use them to bring stuff and do favors," Brown said. "Sometimes, it's just love. But what makes it bad, the guy has been involved in BGF, and that makes it troublesome to the system."
Brown said Chapman is not part of the gang and only smuggled the cell phone and the marijuana because she was instructed to do so.
Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services officials have long acknowledged that contraband cell phones are a major problem in the state's prisons and jails. In 2008, more than 900 phones were confiscated from prison cells, the department said.
In one of the most vivid examples, a Maryland man was convicted by a federal jury of ordering the 2007 killing of a witness in a separate murder case from his cell by using a contraband phone provided by a correctional officer with whom he had a relationship. Patrick Byers Jr. was sentenced last year to life in prison for that killing.