Clinton B. McCracken wants to go home to Canada.
His attorney wants him to as well. So does his father. And so does the United States government.
But the 33-year-old former drug researcher-turned-drug user who made headlines when his fiancee died after a drug-shooting session is stuck in a federal holding pen in York, Pa.
What McCracken wants is to donate a kidney to his ailing father in Alberta. He may already be too late, and because he's been held in detention longer than 72 hours, he could be ineligible as a donor (due to risk of disease) even if he gets back to his home country in time.
McCracken is not a typical immigrant fighting deportation. He desperately wants to get out, to go home, to help his father and to start a new life far from the research labs at the University of Maryland and the rowhouse in Ridgely's Delight that he rented with his fiancee, Carrie John.
But McCracken, who holds a doctorate in physiology and pharmacology, hasn't made it easy for himself. After his fiancee died, he was convicted of manufacturing marijuana — a felony — and was sentenced in March to a five-year suspended prison sentence with two years of supervised probation. The university stripped him of his work permit, and his Canadian passport expired in October.
While waiting to be returned to Canada, McCracken had initially been serving his probation at home, until federal immigration authorities picked him up on Saturday and sent him to Pennsylvania. His lawyer isn't sure why the sudden detention was warranted, and authorities declined to comment on specific cases.
"The irony is that he's spending more time now locked up on this technicality of losing his visa than he got for all the crime he had been charged with," said McCracken's attorney, David B. Irwin. The lawyer blames "a lot of red tape" for his client's detention.
Andres C. Benach, an immigration attorney in Washington, said McCracken is actually one of the lucky ones. He's got an advocate, an attorney and a family who want him home.
"Once people get into detention, they actually want to get out and get home as quickly as possible," Benach said. Many are indigent, have no documents and proof of identity and come from countries that don't want them back.
"The process is so slow and laborious that people fall through the cracks," Benach said.
A spokeswoman for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, Ernestine Fobbs, would not comment on the McCracken case, but she did concede that "getting removed from the country can be a long process."
Deportation must be coordinated with the receiving country, and lack of documentation only complicates the process. Noting that McCracken is practically begging to be deported, Fobbs said, "That's what we want to do as quickly as possible."
McCracken's dangerous lifestyle unraveled in 2009 when on a September night his fiancee injected what they both thought was the narcotic buprenorphine. At the time, authorities surmised she had overdosed on drugs purchased over the Internet from the Philippines.
But an autopsy revealed that there were no drugs in her system and that she was killed by an allergic reaction made worse by her asthma. The couple had been duped into buying fake drugs. Police charged McCracken with growing marijuana, and he pleaded guilty in March.
At first, federal immigration officials allowed him to remain at home in Baltimore. And because Circuit Judge Sylvester B. Cox ordered him on supervised probation, McCracken was unable to travel without getting permission from his probation agent.
On Tuesday, Irwin went back before Cox to plead for the probation to be removed to make it easier for his client to try to return to Canada. But federal immigration authorities complicated the matter by arresting McCracken three days before the hearing.
Cox was reluctant to end the probation and expressed frustration over the dual holds by state and federal authorities on the same suspect. The judge said he was in a "quandary" because he wanted his sentence to "have meaning" but he noted, "It's almost whatever I do is a nullity because the feds have taken over."
The judge compromised by making the probation unsupervised, leaving McCracken, theoretically at least, free to travel. Meanwhile, Irwin said he located his client's expired Canadian passport, which at least helps him prove ties to Canada.
When he'll be able to get there, though, is anybody's guess.
Baltimore Sun reporter Scott Calvert contributed to this article.