PAROLEE RELEASED EVEN AFTER ADMITTING DRUG USE

Prisoner Review Board Called Into Question

SPRINGFIELD -- The state parole agents were looking for a blind man with
dark glasses and cane.

The day before, convicted armed robber Michael Williams had failed to show
up as promised to report for a drug-treatment program, so agents Barry
Morgan and George Schultz knocked on his door.

The man who answered looked Schultz and Morgan in the eyes and told them the
man they were seeking wasn't there. They turned to leave, the man closed the
door -- and bolted out the back.

Neighbors told the agents they had just spoken to Michael Williams.

"He went over fences, under a car, around some garages and through a wooded
area," said Schultz. "He wasn't running by Braille."

Authorities caught Williams, 44, a couple of days later and sent him back to
prison. But three weeks later, the fugitive and admitted drug user was set
free by the Prisoner Review Board.

The reason? Williams claimed marijuana was medicine for his eyesight.

"Subject has sight problems that is (sic) helped by the use of cannabis,"
Prisoner Review Board member Milton Maxwell wrote in the report explaining
why Williams should not serve the rest of his sentence in prison.

Maxwell, a six-year member of the board appointed by the governor, said he
doesn't condone drug use or advocate its legalization but thought Williams
deserved another chance. Helped into the hearing room by a prison guard,
Williams has "a definite sight disadvantage," Maxwell said.

"Whether it's marijuana, if it would help him to either reduce his pain or
maintain what sight he had left, there needs to be some consideration along
those lines," said Maxwell, admitting he didn't explore the details of
Williams' medical history.

Maxwell claimed he would have reached a different conclusion had he known
about Williams' admitted cocaine use or his mother's complaints that drugs
were being sold out of the house she had bought for her son.

But those facts were noted in the parole agents' report to Maxwell -- along
with the part about Williams successfully eluding them. Pressed further,
Maxwell said he didn't remember details.

Schultz was frustrated by Maxwell's decision.

"Why do we expend so much effort trying to capture a guy, just so the
Prisoner Review Board can cut him loose?" he asked.

The incident raises questions about how closely the Prisoner Review Board
examines the cases it handles. In 1998, the 12-member board heard nearly
41,000 cases --an average of more than 60 each per week. That's an increase
of 30 percent from 1992.

Most of those cases involved adult and juvenile inmates seeking release from
prison or cases like Williams, in which ex-cons were back in prison for
violating parole and were trying to win freedom again.

Gov. George Ryan is seeking legislative permission to add board members
because of the increasing workload. Maxwell makes $67,800, similar to the
salaries of other board members.

Williams was in a Jacksonville drug-treatment program and now is in a
halfway house there. He said he has retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye
disease that has reduced his sight dramatically, and which forces him to use
dark glasses when he's in bright daylight.

Additionally, he recently was diagnosed with glaucoma, which puts painful
pressure on his eyes that is said to be relieved by smoking marijuana.

"It was coincidence that my drug of choice and my disease just happened to
shake hands," Williams said. "And believe me, it works."

He said the encounter with the parole agents resulted from a mix-up in who
was going to get paperwork the day before for his admittance into treatment.
He acknowledged he didn't cooperate but "logic does not even come through
your brain when you have a (drug) habit," he said.

Williams said it would be impossible to run from the agents and that he
simply walked out the back door and across two back yards to a neighbor's
house.

Maxwell's decision, in which he reinstated parole but required Williams to
complete alcohol- and drug-abuse treatment, had to be approved by two other
members of the Prisoner Review Board. Chairwoman Anne Taylor won't criticize
the outcome.

"Our decisions are subjective. That was Mr. Maxwell's judgment, and I don't
second-guess him in this particular instance," Taylor said.

Some criminal defense lawyers say the board weighs prison overcrowding in
deciding borderline cases. Taylor said overcrowding is not an issue the
board considers.

But Corrections Department spokesman Nic Howell argues treatment should not
be considered in deciding whether an inmate should stay in prison for
violating parole.

"The guy's doing the drugs; he ought to go back to prison," Howell said.