Prosecutors asking 7 to 9 years for former FBI agent who stole heroin - Printable Version +- IOPList.Org (https://www.ioplist.org) +-- Forum: Off Topic (https://www.ioplist.org/forumdisplay.php?fid=25) +--- Forum: World News (https://www.ioplist.org/forumdisplay.php?fid=27) +--- Thread: Prosecutors asking 7 to 9 years for former FBI agent who stole heroin (/showthread.php?tid=367)

Prosecutors asking 7 to 9 years for former FBI agent who stole heroin - IceWizard - 07-09-2015 Prosecutors will urge a federal judge on Thursday to send a former FBI agent to prison for seven to nine years for stealing heroin from criminal investigations to feed his own addiction. The U.S. attorney’s office in the District said Matthew Lowry, who worked in the Washington field office investigating narcotics traffickers, ruined drug cases and forced authorities to dismiss charges against 28 people, many of whom had been convicted and were serving time in federal prison. Lowry’s attorney is pressing the judge to allow the former agent to serve his time on home detention, stressing that his client, 33, was motivated not by “greed” or “malice” but by an addiction that began with prescription painkillers he took for an intestinal inflammation. But prosecutors said that Lowry not only stole during a 14-month period, he also carefully covered up his crimes. “Whatever can be said of the defendant’s decision to self-medicate, what is both indefensible and inexcusable is the fact that the defendant decided to supply himself with heroin by stealing it from FBI custody,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin R. Brenner wrote in a sentencing memorandum that uses unusually direct language to counter Lowry’s argument that he should be treated as an addict, not a criminal. This was “a premeditated and systematic cover-up, perpetrated by an FBI agent, as an FBI agent,” Brenner wrote. “The defendant manipulated and abused his official duties both to steal the heroin and then hide his tampering. Regardless of whether the thefts may be attributable to the defendant’s dependency, the cover-up was hardly the product of artificially or temporarily clouded judgment.” On March 31, Lowry pleaded guilty to 64 criminal charges, including obstruction of justice, tampering with evidence and heroin possession. He was caught at the end of September when fellow agents found him incoherent outside his agency car, which had run out of gas in a lot near the Navy Yard in Southeast Washington. Agents later found drugs in open evidence bags in the car. Lowry had taken advantage of lax evidence rules at the Washington field office that enabled him to sign out drugs for lab testing and then keep the packages in his car for months without anyone questioning him. After taking heroin, Lowry added filler to the bags so their weight would not be different when he returned them, and he forged colleagues’ signatures on sign-out sheets. In an interview last month, Lowry, who is married and has a 16-month-old son, described his long battle with colitis. He said that one doctor prescribed pain medication and that he soon became addicted. After that doctor disappeared, he had no way to get new prescriptions and, in withdrawal, turned to heroin. Defense attorney Robert C. Bonsib filed voluminous letters of support from Lowry’s father, a retired assistant police chief in Anne Arundel County, as well as Lowry’s mother, his wife, brothers, pastor and friends, and Bonsib is pleading with the judge to deviate from sentencing guidelines and put Lowry on extended home detention instead of sending him to prison. He noted that Lowry stole drugs to feed a personal addiction, not as part of a scheme hatched out of “greed, malice, kickbacks, pay- offs [or] selling or distributing drugs to others.” Even as Lowry stole drugs, Bonsib wrote, “he did not bribe other people to cover up his mistakes, and he never stopped enforcing the law on others.” Bonsib also says in his sentencing memorandum that Lowry, once caught, immediately confessed, began treatment and walked prosecutors through his thefts step by step so they could assess the damage to criminal cases. The former agent has talked about his addiction publicly in hopes of serving as a warning to others, his lawyer said. Bonsib called the drug thefts a small slice of his client’s otherwise law-abiding life: “This is an extraordinary case, involving an incredible young man, whose intentions were honorable, whose conditions were demanding, whose mistakes were serious, but whose potential is limitless.” Brenner countered in his memorandum that Lowry did not seek help or turn himself in until he was caught. “The defendant stood silent,” the prosecutor wrote, “even as numerous cases impacted by his misconduct were proceeding and one defendant after another was entering a guilty plea. Concerned primarily with himself, the defendant, in lieu of serving the interests of justice, actively and purposefully sought to obstruct it.” Citing one large-scale drug investigation, Brenner said that while colleagues were working to build a case, Lowry was “actively and covertly sabotaging it. And sabotage it he did, as all the charges against all the defendants were ultimately dismissed.” The sentencing hearing is set for 1:30 p.m. Thursday. Full Story With Pics Here