BACK IN SAFE ARMS AGAIN

Woman In Peru Prison 3 Years

HOUSTON -- After 3 years in a Peruvian prison, Jennifer Davis stepped
gingerly off a Continental Airlines flight Tuesday and into the embrace of
her father, ending a frightening saga of crime and punishment for the young
woman from Downstate Illinois.

Family, friends and strangers from across the country had rallied behind the
Danville woman imprisoned in Peru after she was tried and convicted of
attempting to carry drugs to the United States.

Reviled by some for getting involved in international drug trafficking, she
became the symbol to others of youthful naivete and the plight of Americans
trapped in brutal foreign prisons and legal mazes.

Stirred by her imprisonment, many in the Illinois congressional delegation
enlisted their colleagues' aid in adopting resolutions urging better
observance of the rights of Americans in Peruvian prisons.

Her family, one of strict religious and political beliefs, learned
acceptance and forgiveness for the tall young woman with dark brown hair.
Her father, Denny Davis, a captain at the state prison near Danville, led
the campaign to free her.

He was on hand to welcome her when she reached American soil and passed
through customs at Houston International Airport, engulfing her in a bear
hug, something he had rarely done, he said, during her years of growing up.

"I'm totally shocked," his daughter said again and again in a gentle voice.
"I can't believe it. It is such a shock to see this and to be here. I'm
completely on the edge of my nerves." Sitting in the airport lounge in jeans
and a black sweater, she seemed stunned by her newly restored freedom and
questions about what might lie ahead.

As she had previously vowed while she languished in prison, Davis said she
would work with teenagers, warning them about the dangers of drugs and drug
dealing. But first, "I have to put my life together."

On the flight from Lima she had sat next to a cheerful, outgoing passenger
whom, she recalled, had casually recounted his work as an American
government official, investigating drug dealing and trafficking in Peru.

"If only he knew about my life," she said.

Three years and two months ago Davis was a one-time high school homecoming
beauty with ambitions of becoming a model. A shy teenager from a strict
family who had never been in trouble with the law, not even with a traffic
ticket, she stepped into a world that seemed utterly unimaginable to family
and friends back home in Danville.

At the airport in Lima, she was arrested by police who discovered 2.2
kilograms of cocaine in her baggage, drugs worth nearly $50,000 on Chicago's
streets. She was 19 at the time. Krista Barnes, her roommate from suburban
Los Angeles, where Davis had moved after high school, was carrying 3.2
kilograms. She was 18.

For the promise of $5,000 each, the two had agreed to carry the drugs back
to the U.S. after what they thought would be a luxury-filled, three-day
fling in Peru. It turned into a nightmare instead.

Recruited by members of a Peruvian drug ring working in Los Angeles, they
followed in the path of other American and foreign women, most of them young
and naive.

They became "mules," a term for those used by drug traffickers to slip
unnoticed past drug and customs officials.

Like many other drug couriers, they wound up in a grim, overcrowded prison
in Lima where drugs and sickness and insanity are commonplace. The prison
spends only 74 cents a day for each inmate's food needs, so inmates must buy
their own food or go hungry.

An attractive woman who had briefly modeled in Milan, the years in prison
were harsh on Davis. Her skin was severely burned by hours of walking under
the Andean sun in the prison yard. She lost weight. She lost hair. She
suffered bouts of illness.

When arrested, Davis and Barnes warded off prison guards who appeared intent
on molesting them. Conditions were grim: Davis remembered wearing earplugs
at night to keep out roaches. She recalled that at times she considered
taking her life. Her shame for herself and her family weighed heavily on
her.

The two young women cooperated with officials from the beginning, and as a
result the three Peruvians who set them up with the drugs in Lima were also
arrested.

His daughter's arrest was especially difficult for Denny Davis, 45, a
24-year-veteran at the state prison near Danville.

From the start, Davis and his wife, Claire, an office worker at Blue
Cross-Blue Shield in Danville, vowed that their daughter would do her time
in jail. But once they discovered the miserable living standards that she
and others faced, they launched a campaign to improve the prison's
conditions and battle the legal quagmire that had ensnared their daughter.

The campaign enlisted the support of most of the Illinois congressional
delegation, which pushed through proposals calling for better care for
Americans in Peru's prisons. Others stepped forward as well.

One was Ralph Ruebner, a John Marshall Law School professor, who read about
Davis and helped the family plead the case in Congress and before the
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that Peru could no longer ignore
the rights of inmates, whether Peruvian or foreign.

Strangers raised money for the Davis family and other Americans in Peru's
prisons. Friends and neighbors from the eastern Illinois town helped with
financial aid for the family, who went into debt trying to help their
daughter and other foreigners in Peru's prisons.

After her arrest became public, neighbors in the modest subdivision just
south of Danville put up yellow ribbons on the trees in front of their
houses to show their support too.

But there were others in Danville who said they felt little sympathy for
someone who had been caught dealing in drugs, and especially in such a large
amount. Their letters filled the Danville newspaper.

Given 6-year prison terms, Davis and Barnes were paroled in July in Peru,
pending their transfer to the U.S., where they will serve out their parole.
But their return dragged on, and the Davis family, upset by the many legal
twists and turns of the case, feared their daughter would remain exiled in
Peru.

"You just worry night and day for your daughter," Davis said, waiting at the
airport for his daughter's arrival, reminiscing about what had taken place
in the past few years. He had learned so much about himself, he said with a
smile.

"This was a big slap in the face for me," he said. "Before this happened, I
was a very closed person. But this opened my eyes. Before, I wouldn't give
someone the time of day. It was the support from friends and strangers that
changed me.

"Before this happened with Jennifer," he said, seemingly intent on
cataloging all the changes he has witnessed, he was far less forgiving of
people who went wrong. But no more.

"Lord help us," said the elder Davis, the son of a Pentecostal minister,
"every one of us makes a mistake."

Commenting on her last month in the prison, Jennifer Davis said that far
fewer American women were being used as drug mules and the prison was
filling up with women from Asia and Europe.

"It's always the same. The same story. The same thing," she said with a
frown as she walked hand-in-hand with her father down the airport corridor,
checking on their delayed flight to Indianapolis, where her mother and
sister waited with a car to take them home to Danville.

Krista Barnes, who also arrived on the flight from Lima, tried to talk about
the odd feeling of having lived a completely different life in prison in
Peru--a life where the women protected each other and relied on the random
kindness of strangers from the outside and each other to get by.

"She has been my sister, my aunt, my mother, my everything," Barnes said
tearfully as she left Davis to return home to Los Angeles.

But she could not speak more about it, and neither could Davis.

"It's a world far away," said the young woman, clutching her father.