Albemarle woman dies in prison serving shoplifting sentence under Virginia's 'three strikes' law

Two years later she did, on the night of April 16, 2018, at the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women, still serving a three-year sentence for shoplifting $45 worth of suntan products.

As of the end of last year, the Virginia Department of Corrections said that 164 people were in prison solely for convictions under a law that can turn a third petit larceny conviction into a felony punishable by up to five years behind bars.

That’s how Reed got to the state’s largest prison for women. But her story is not that simple.

Like many “three-strike” petit larceny offenders, Reed was locked up again after years of lawbreaking and efforts to end alcohol and drug abuse that frustrated her family, friends, law enforcement and the courts.

Nevertheless, some who knew Reed — her family and a therapist — and some who did not, such as Albemarle County Commonwealth’s Attorney-elect James Hingeley — do not believe prison was the way to handle such apparently intractable lawbreaking.

Hingeley, a former public defender, acknowledges that offenders like Reed are a serious problem for the community.

“But I’d say the odds of a three-year prison sentence solving this problem, or one like this, are very, very low,” Hingeley said. “It’s almost fair to say that you’re going to have 100% failure.”

“If she hadn’t died in prison, which is tragic, she would have come out and we would have been right back where we started from,” he said.

Reed’s sister, Peggy Vandevander of Palmyra, agrees. “Every time she got in trouble, every time she went to jail, Momma would always tell them, ‘She doesn’t need to be in jail because of this. She needs to be in a treatment center,’” Vandevander recalled.

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The written plea agreement with the Albemarle County Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office indicates there was no agreed-upon sentence, leaving Reed’s punishment up to the judge.

Shannon Pollock, then a public defender who represented Reed, recalled her Jan. 6, 2016, sentencing hearing. “I was asking for no active incarceration since she had this plan in place to stay sober and safe, to be in a place where people were watching out for her and holding her accountable,” Pollack said.

Vandevander said Reed would have stayed at Georgia’s Healing House in Charlottesville, where she was already assisting with fundraising.

“It would have been a perfect plan,” Vandevander said. “When she was sober, when she was not drinking or doing drugs, you couldn’t ask for a more loving, caring, sweet person.”

Court records show that in fashioning a sentence for Reed, Circuit Judge Cheryl V. Higgins was concerned about Reed’s criminal record that stretched back to at least 1995 and included check forgery and public swearing/intoxication, in addition to shoplifting and larceny.

Among other things, Higgins noted in a sentencing document that Reed “had 26 felony convictions. She was on probation six times and violated [probation] six times.”

The judge wrote that in 2014 Reed successfully completed a drug court program and previously had been ordered to do other intensive treatment programs.

Higgins sentenced Reed to five years in prison with two years suspended. A 12-month suspended sentence for misdemeanor driving while intoxicated was to be served concurrently.

Steven D. Benjamin, a Richmond lawyer and past president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said the case illustrates the tension between sentencing a defendant for the harm they might inflict based on their prior, demonstrated inability to follow the law, as opposed to the actual harm committed in the underlying offense.

The law in question calls for jail terms of 30 days to 12 months for misdemeanor larceny convictions. A conviction for a third or subsequent larceny offense, however, is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison.

There are at least two similar laws that turn misdemeanors into felonies on third convictions: One concerns domestic assault and the other driving while intoxicated.

The 164 offenders in prison with one or more felony convictions under Virginia’s petit larceny law are serving an average sentence of roughly three years, according to prison officials.

In addition, there are almost 1,300 others in Virginia prisons convicted under the same law who are also serving time for one or more other felonies.

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When she was arrested for the shoplifting charge that sent her to prison, Reed, who was 5 feet 2 inches tall and weighed 205 pounds, had serious health problems.

“My sister said, ‘If they put me back in jail again, I’ll never come out alive,’” Vandevander said.

Reed was one of four children who grew up in Albemarle County on state Route 53. “Donna was the baby,” Vandevander said.

She was creative, intelligent and read constantly.

“She was the smartest of all of us,” Vandevander said. But she added that Reed’s use of drugs and alcohol plagued her from an early age.

“Momma would always say, ‘If your sister could pick better friends, not do the drugs or alcohol, your sister could have been a millionaire.’ That’s how smart and intelligent she was,” she said.

Reed attended Albemarle County schools and went to Piedmont Virginia Community College, but did not graduate.

“She could talk to anybody, from a low-class person to the president,” Vandevander said. “She could carry herself very well.” Reed was divorced and did not have children, her sister said.

“It always upset Momma every time she did do something that Momma would say was stupid,” Vandevander said. “Because if Donna needed something, Momma would have bought it for her or gave her the money for it. She never would have really had to steal it.

“But she did steal and get in trouble.”

Daniel Price, a clinical psychologist with offices in Charlottesville and Culpeper, said he started seeing Reed for anxiety but it turned out she had post-traumatic stress disorder, which could explain Reed’s drinking and shoplifting, at least in part.

“She was abused a lot when she was a little girl,” Price said. “There was a lot of sexual abuse by older kids in the area. I think that was the crux of her problem, her PTSD. Her memories were so awful for her to remember that she would do anything that she could to try and avoid thinking, feeling, remembering.”

The Richmond Times-Dispatch typically does not make public a person’s history of sexual assault without their permission. In this case, Reed’s trauma could help explain her substance use and the addictive behavior that led to her incarceration. Also, her sister had no objection to the disclosure.

Price said Reed avoided dealing with her trauma by using drugs and alcohol and by keeping her life in chaos.

Shoplifting may have helped her afford her substance use habit, he said.

“But I think shoplifting was also sort of a way of avoiding dealing with her trauma,” Price said. If she was worried about getting caught, or was planning to write a bad check or some other misconduct, it would help her avoid dealing with her traumas, he said.

Reed was seeing another therapist in 2015 as her sentencing approached. Nevertheless, Price said, “I think jail wasn’t what she needed. What she needed was to be in intensive treatment for her PTSD. But instead she would act out, get locked up and then I wouldn’t see her for a little while.”

Records show the March 11, 2015, shoplifting incident that sent her to prison occurred at a Charlottesville-area tanning salon. Vandevander said Reed drove off and the business reported the theft to police.

“She was drinking when this happened,” her sister said.

Vandevander said police found Reed at a store in Keswick. “She had the stolen product in her car and she mouthed off at the police officer and that kind of thing. That was like her third offense or something by that time,” she said.

“I don’t know what she was doing with it,” Vandevander said of the tanning product. “A lot of the stuff that she stole was not stuff that she really needed.”

Reed was indicted in Albemarle Circuit Court on June 1, 2015, for stealing property with a value of less than $200 having been convicted two or more times previously of larceny.

Reed pleaded guilty to the charge in September 2015. The agreement called for her to pay $45 in restitution to the tanning salon.

While awaiting sentencing, a pretrial officer reported to Higgins that Reed had moved into Georgia’s Healing House, a sober living facility in Charlottesville, on Dec. 21, 2015.

The report said that Reed admitted drinking alcohol on Nov. 4, 2015, and that she was arrested for driving under the influence. However, the officer told Higgins that Reed had otherwise been reporting as scheduled and tested negative on random drug and alcohol screens.

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After her sentencing, Reed wrote letters to the judge asking for a lesser punishment or for some other consideration.

She also complained about the death of her mother, her brother’s cancer, and her own addiction and health problems.

Two weeks after sentencing, she wrote a 12-page letter to Higgins.

“I am an alcoholic. Bad. I have been all my life. ... I am tired, your honor, of this vicious cycle. I know it can be stopped,” she wrote.

The theft followed an incident involving vehicle repair that upset Reed and that was brought up by the judge at the sentencing hearing.

Reed’s letter quoted the scolding the judge gave her in court that day: “’What woman never left an auto repair shop feeling stupid — but they don’t go to [an] ABC store, get a pint and drink it all down and then go and steal something!?!’”

In her letter, Reed gave this reply: “Yes — but not all women have been traumatized, abused, raped by men, boys.”

On Feb. 3, 2016, she wrote Higgins from the Albemarle Regional Jail, reporting, “My many health problems have overwhelmed the medical department — just as I feared.”

Reed’s mother, Shirley Temple Armstrong, died the next month, on March 25. Vandevander said jail staff members escorted Reed to Sentara Martha Jefferson Hospital in Albemarle to visit their mother a week before the death.

Reed was later transferred to Fluvanna and, in July 2016, she wrote to Higgins again. “My mother, your honor, died. ... I thought I would too.”

She followed that letter up with another to the judge a month later in which she notes that her ex-husband, who was a close friend, died soon after her mother and that her brother was seriously ill with cancer. “So you see this has been a rough sentence for me,” she wrote.

“Please reconsider and let me help my brother,” Reed wrote. She made promises in the letter that she had no doubt made before: “I’ve learned my lesson. I will never touch anything that is not mine, more important — never drink again.”

Reed’s health problems continued at the prison, Vandevander said. Eventually, she said, calls stopped coming from Reed because she could no longer speak.

Vandevander said that on the night of April 16-17, 2018, a police officer arrived at her house.

“I didn’t know what in the world was going on and when I went out there he asked who I was and I told him, and he said, ‘I’m sorry to tell you that your sister died.’ And I said, ‘Excuse me?’ and he said, ‘She passed away.’”

Reed was 55 years old. An incident report filed by the Virginia Department of Corrections said a nurse checking Reed’s vital signs in her infirmary cell at 10 p.m. called a code blue medical emergency.

“Resident resting in bed with labored breathing. Eyes fixed. Resident unresponsive to verbal and physical stimuli,” a prison nurse later wrote in her report. CPR and other efforts were made to revive her. Oxygen was administered due to her decreasing respiration and heart rates. The Lake Monticello Rescue Squad arrived but she was pronounced dead shortly before 11 p.m.

The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, which investigates the deaths of people in state custody, would only report: “The cause of death is combined gabapentin and topiramate toxicity with acute hepatitis. The manner is accident.”

One drug is used to prevent seizures and the other can be used to treat alcohol abuse. No further information about how Reed had taken or was given too much medication was available. An expert said the two drugs are not among those commonly abused, but they can be.

Vandevander said the family does not accept that her death was accidental and questions the health care Reed received at Fluvanna.

“She was so sick and she told us she would die if we couldn’t do something for her. She was not going to come out of there alive,” Vandevander said. “She would call me constantly and would say that she couldn’t eat, she couldn’t swallow.”

The Virginia Department of Corrections has been under a consent decree since 2016 stemming from a class-action lawsuit that alleged a contractor at Fluvanna provided inadequate medical care at the time of Reed’s death.

The department did not respond to a request for comment on Vandevander’s concerns. In the past, however, the department has defended what it says is appropriate medical care provided to inmates at Fluvanna and other prisons.

Hingeley, the incoming Albemarle commonwealth’s attorney, was not involved in Reed’s case but believes that “this is the kind of case that prosecutors should be looking at very closely.”

A prosecutor can use his or her discretion to simply reduce the charge against someone with prior larceny convictions to a misdemeanor charge and not automatically pursue the felony of third-offense larceny, he said.

“Finding a solution in cases like this is very hard,” he said. “I think that the answer I would come to is we can’t give up when the alternative is three years in prison, which accomplishes nothing.”

He said Georgia’s Healing House, combined with tight court supervision, might have been an answer, or a sentence to a jail with a therapeutic community might have worked.

“It’s just the nature of the disease that relapses happen,” Hingeley said.

Sometimes it takes several attempts before users get turned around. And, he said, “all these things you can try again.”