Posted on 08/13/2009 12:39:37 PM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
Washington, D.C. (AHN) - The chief of staff of former President Bill Clinton when he was governor of Arkansas was charged on Wednesday with smuggling tattoo needles into the death row unit of the state prison. Betsey Wright, a death penalty opponent, reportedly plans to surrender to authorities next week.
According to a police report posted online by the Arkansas Times, Wright tried to bring in contraband into the maximum security unit during a May 22 visit. The items were an ink pen with tweezers and a needle, a knife, a boxcutter and 48 tattoo needles hidden in a Nachos Cheese Doritos bag. She is charged with a total of 51 felonies.
An x-ray machine had detected the ink pen and knife as Wright was going through the security check during her visit. A prison officer then noticed the red bag of chips that "appeared to have been opened and then resealed."
"Wright state that she had brought them from the machine," the report said. When the a prison officer opened the bag and found "something red in color and wrapped in tissue and tape," the former Clinton staffer allegedly said, "Oh my goodness," and told the officer "that the bag was lying on the bottom of the chip machine and she thought she was getting a free bag of chips.
Wright will turn herself in next week and post the $1,500 bond, the Arkansas Times said.
The 66-year-old served as top aide for Clinton at the Governor's Mansion, and was deputy chairperson of the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign.
She was also chairperson of the Arkansas Democratic Party and an executive for a lobbying firm, the Wexler Group. An anti-death penalty advocate, she has been a frequent visitor at the Arkansas State Prison, which has about 40 death row inmates.
She's all that and a bag of chips, alright! LOL!
I think she’s the one who coined the phrase “bimbo eruptions.”
Stupid question: Did this woman ever wonder why that bag of vending machine doritos was so heavy?........All that stuff in there and she picks it up and doesnt wonder?
I’m more worried why the AP reporter doesn’t wonder about this or a dozen other questions.
Ms. Wright didn't wonder cause she knew what was in the bag.
She knows where a bunch of skeletons are buried.
Sandy Burger must have had a prior engagement.
Betsey Wright transgressed into ill-fated and illogical retirement from the world of compensated labor, due to a lack of time to go to work. Things started going astray when she moved to a house on Beaver Lake overlooking the Ozarks just outside of Rogers. Peace and calm caused her to set new directions of activism.
She now works constantly on the very first personal political position she ever took. When the Rosenbergs were executed in 1953, Betsey decide that capital punishment was inconsistent with the ideals of the United States and contradictory to her Christian faith. She was almost ten years old, and while her convictions never wavered, knowing what on earth could be done about them has been a problem for most of her life.
Her current endeavors to abolish the death penalty call upon the skills she developed during forty-some-odd years previously spent in politics and government, including thirteen years working for then-Governor Bill Clinton as campaign manager, chief of staff and deputy chair of the 1992 Presidential campaign. Prior to that, she recruited women nationally to run for public office, and even way before that worked with former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan to reform Texas’s voter registration laws, and to conduct annual voter registration drives in her native Texas.
In addition to fostering discussion and awareness of capital punishment, Wright makes a 600-mile-round-trip to visit friends on death row one day each week. She is an advocate and activist for ‘the Row’ regarding conditions in which they live while awaiting final judicial review and scrutiny of their original trials and sentencing.
She keeps house for a herd of seven cats, rejects all entreaties to work in political campaigns, and now works part-time cataloguing papers and papers and papers of the years and years and years of the Clinton gubernatorial administrations.
“I’m more worried why the AP reporter doesn’t wonder about this or a dozen other questions”
Exactly, especially why the headline reads “tatoo needles” insted of a friggin KNIFE. I have never been threatened by someone stating that they were going to tatt me to death.
Kathy Bates (SMU Graduate) as "Libby Holden" (based very loosely on Wright)
Well now we know why slick Willie used Sandy Burgler to steal all the stuff from the National Archives. This woman is clearly NOT a very good scam artist—at least not with sneaking things into prisons. Maybe Sandy was busy that day?
Stay classy, Democrats...
Not bad. :)
Just need to click the link for the full story.
“reportedly plans to surrender to authorities next week. “
So, it doesn’t fit into her schedule this week?
And the rest of us would be hunted down immediately instead?
She’s special, so she can choose when she surrenders?
Right up there with "the dog ate my homework".....LOL!
No, that was Bill's secretary Bettie Currie....
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