Sentenced to one year in jail for selling two doses of heroin to police confidential informant in Dillingham in late 2014.
Darcie M. Clark, 35, pleaded guilty Wednesday to one count of dealing heroin and will serve a flat one year jail sentence. KDLG’s Dave Bendinger has more:
KDLG: Darcie Clark was arrested by Dillingham Police after she sold two doses of heroin to a confidential informant in December 2014. She was charged with three drug related crimes, two for possession and one for dealing. Clark posted $15,000 bail and was released from custody.
In pleading guilty Wednesday, she said her legal troubles have all been tied to a past heroin addiction now conquered.
"That was an issue before," she told the judge. "My life was going downhill and in the trash can, so I moved out of Dillingham and willingly went into rehabilitation program, and I’ve been doing well on it. I have no intention of going back to that lifestyle or back to Dillingham, so I think moving out of there was the best thing for me."
The state accepted a plea deal to the one charge of second degree misconduct involving a controlled substance, a class B felony. Under the new SB 91 guidelines, with her prior record, Clark could have faced two to five years’ jail time. (Had she been convicted of all three charges, she might have faced up to 20 years in jail.) The state agreed to mitigating factors that Clark's was a small amount of heroin sold, and the crime was in the least serious category of the charge, and settled with the one year sentence.
Judge Pat Douglass accepted the deal. "You know the sale and distribution of heroin in our community is very destructive. So I don't take these kinds of sentences light, no matter how much drugs is or is," she said.
Douglass continued, speaking to how a sentence sends a message of deterrence "to other people who might consider following your line of behavior. Most importantly, we have a concerned community here. It's no secret there are folks who follow all of these cases. A very active group that monitors the courthouse and all of these heroin cases and what's going on in our community. So that indicates to me that it is a primary concern, and the court has a responsibility to the community to see that the cases that are prosecuted are prosecuted appropriately."
"I would like to thank you for accepting our deal and let you know that a lot of people in that community do have a problem," Clark said. "I believe they don’t want to have to be jailed or bound by the opiate either, but if they had a treatment program I believe that most of that community would clean up. The thing you guys need to fight most for is a center over there that would help people instead of incarcerating them, because I think that’s the only way you’re going to solve the problem over there.”
Darcie Clark can apply to serve her one year sentence under house arrest rather than in a penitentiary. A decision on that is expected before she remands to custody in December.
Clark was arrested in Anchorage in September 2015, along with her husband Brian Clark and Gust Romie. APD found the trio in a parked car with close to 40 grams of heroin and $18,000 cash between them. She still faces a possession charge in that case. Her husbandBrian Clark is in custody on a murder charge for allegedly killing Ella Olsen during a heroin related burglary last year.
Reach the author at dave@kdlg.org or 907-842-5281.