ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, August 23, 1996 TAG: 9608230086
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: FINCASTLE
SOURCE: MATT CHITTUM STAFF WRITER
NOTE: Below
INDIA PICKENS wants to serve her sentence near her family instead of in the Botetourt County Jail.
India Pickens got loaded last August and drove her 18-wheel rig down Interstate 81 flinging eggs at other trucks, police say.
She's been convicted of driving under the influence, refusing to take field sobriety tests, using a radar detector, and kicking a state trooper in the groin, which put him in the hospital and caused him to miss several days of work.
She gave a false address when she was released on bail and never showed up for her initial trial for assaulting the trooper. Police found her only after she was jailed in Tennessee for violating her probation there for previous DUI and drug possession convictions.
Now, she wants someone to give her a break.
She has been sentenced to a year in the Botetourt County Jail for kicking the trooper, but is pleading with authorities to let her serve her time in Fayette County, Tenn., her hometown. She's written letters to the Fincastle Herald, Botetourt Circuit Judge George Honts, and the governors of Virginia and Tennessee.
She just wants to be near her three children, she says.
"My daughter is 6 years old," Pickens wrote Honts this week. "She has a heart problem. My mother is almost declared legally blind. I know I have said this over and over. But I will not stop as long as there is a breath left in me because I love them."
"If there are those that think she should be able to go to Tennessee, they don't know the whole story," said Botetourt County Sheriff Reed Kelly, who is in charge of the jail.
The transfer to western Tennessee would put Pickens not only near her kids, but her father, a Somersville City Police dispatcher and friend of the sheriff who keeps the Fayette County jail and who asked the judge to transfer Pickens there.
Honts has said that, if there's a way to transfer her within the law, he won't stand in the way. Virginia Secretary of Public Safety Jerry Kilgore wrote to Pickens this month that a transfer is possible. Pickens' attorney, Terry Grimes, has until Sept. 30 to figure out the details.
But if it were up to Kelly and Commonwealth's Attorney Joel Branscom, Pickens wouldn't be going anywhere.
"This woman assaulted a trooper who lives in Botetourt County and protects the people of Botetourt County," Kelly said. "She ought to do her time here. She owes her penalty to the people of Botetourt County."
Branscom said Pickens is not the kind of convict who is generally deserving of a break, such as a transfer. "When someone runs from us, I'm not sure they deserve that kind of treatment," he said. Honts has followed the law closely throughout, Branscom said, but if Pickens is moved, "I just feel like we lose control.''
Kelly said he doesn't want to impugn the reputation of another law enforcement agency, but the fact that Fayette County Sheriff Bill G. Kelley chose to contact Honts and not him leads him to believe the effort to move Pickens is really an effort to allow her to do easier jail time.
Is that related to her father's place in law enforcement? "Absolutely," Kelly said.
Kelley, the Tennessee sheriff, says that would never be the case.
"If that sentence was here, that court order would be followed to a T," Kelley said. "She would not be out here running around."
His only interest in the case is in helping Pickens' father, Robert Green, and his wife. They are both near 70 and not in the best of health, he said.
"They are a family that has been in this county for probably a hundred years," he said. "They've all been good people until [Pickens]."
Pickens was in Kelley's jail for a probation violation when she was returned to Botetourt to stand trial.
Pickens was arrested Aug. 19, 1995, after the truckers she had been egging forced her off I-81 and called police. It was then that she kicked Trooper Stephen W. McChesney.
When she was located in Kelley's jail after failing to appear for trial on the misdemeanor assault charge, Branscom dropped the misdemeanor charge in favor of a felony one. Pickens was convicted May 30 of unlawful wounding of a police officer. On July 16, Honts sentenced her to one year in jail with no time suspended, the minimum sentence possible.
For his part, Kelley said, "I really shouldn't have been in the middle of it to begin with." He thinks the matter should be handled at the state level. If it weren't for his concern for Pickens' parents and children, he said, he wouldn't be involved at all.
Kelly in Botetourt County is less impressed by Pickens' need to be near her kids.
"She wasn't worried about them when she was drunk and raucous up there on the interstate," Kelly said. "And she sure wasn't thinking about them when she was kicking this trooper."
LENGTH: Medium: 92 linesby CNB