TRUCKER FREE AFTER 8 MONTHS IN DETROIT PRISON

Marijuana Planted In Canadian Vehicle

A Windsor trucker who was been jailed in Michigan almost eight months,
charged with attempting to smuggle more than a million dollars worth
of high-grade marijuana across the border, is back home after being
acquitted by an American jury.

"It's lovely, lovely to be home," Daniel Bartos said from his home
Tuesday.

On Monday, following a five-day trial in U.S. Eastern District of
Michigan court, the 31-year-old was found not guilty on smuggling and
trafficking charges.

He faced a mandatory minimum five-year prison term upon
conviction.

"I worried a lot in jail," said Bartos. He said he spent his mornings
reading, in particular the Bible, and his afternoons were filled
working as a janitor in a prison kitchen for 12 cents US per hour.

Bartos, an independent trucker hired by a Leamington firm, was
delivering a tractor-trailer load of seed corn for the Pioneer grain
company from its Chatham-Kent facility to Iowa when he was pulled over
at the Ambassador Bridge last April 25.

U.S. border agents arrested the trucker after discovering three duffle
bags containing more than 100 kg of high-grade marijuana hidden inside
the trailer. The street value was estimated at $1.2 million US.

"Somebody probably set me up ... or used me. I don't know," he
said.

Bartos spent about six weeks at the Wayne County Jail before being
transferred to a federal detention centre in Milan, Mich., south of
Ann Arbor. He said his lawyer's advice was "stay strong, don't give
up," while he learned from fellow inmates not to think about the
outside and freedom, "just focus on the inside."

As is the general rule for Canadians charged with such offences on the
Detroit side of the border, Bartos was denied bail.

It was a rare miss for Michigan's federal drug prosecutors, who have a
"fairly high conviction rate" in drug smuggling cases, said Bob
Donaldson, drug unit chief for the U.S. attorney's eastern district
office.

A source said it's the first such case Donaldson's office has lost in
18 months.

"I guess it's testament to the U.S. legal process that individuals can
still be found innocent," said Greg Palmore, spokesman for U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Bartos gives credit to his legal team, which included two Detroit
lawyers, James Howarth and Craig Tank, and two Windsor lawyers, Pat
Ducharme and Sam Vucinic.

"These guys are just superb lawyers," Ducharme said of the Detroit duo
who led the defence. He said it is "not unusual" to have so many
lawyers involved in such a case: "It's part of the modern world."

Bartos won't say how big his legal bills were, only that he "paid a
lot of money."

"He got a lot of people to care about him," said Tank, adding his
client had strong character witnesses and that even his church
congregation held fundraisers for him.

After three years of trucking, Bartos said he's giving up the big rigs
and returning in January to his former vocation as a licensed auto
mechanic.

A single man with three married brothers living in the area, Bartos,
who came to Windsor in 1994 from his native Serbia, said he just wants
to "go back to my life ... try to find a girlfriend ... then get married."

Tank said narcotics couriers target truckers like Bartos for two
reasons -- they don't have to pay them anything, and if they're
caught, there's nobody to snitch on.