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Phone increases inmate's cell usage
Published April 3, 2005
ANGLETON — A habitual criminal serving 36 years in prison will have to do another 40 after a Brazoria County jury convicted him of possession of a cellular phone in the Darrington Prison Unit.
Michael Manor, 40, was convicted Wednesday of possession of a prohibited substance in a correctional facility for having the phone on him Feb. 21, 2004. He was the first man in Texas to be convicted of possessing a cellular phone under a law that went into effect in 2003.
The new 40-year prison term will not begin until Manor has served his current sentences.
While the offense might seem minor on the surface, authorities said the phone can present a grave danger in a prison.
“You can coordinate crime from the inside out,” Brazoria County District Attorney Jeri Yenne said. “It is a significant safety issue. You can actually engineer murder from the inside and say you were (in prison).”
Darrington authorities have seized about 75 cellular phones in the last year, Warden Arthur Velasquez said.
“You probably have some staff members involved,” Velasquez said. “You’re going to have some that are maybe even dropped on our prison grounds and a trusty can pick them up.”
Velasquez said a former prison employee is serving time because he was planning to smuggle a cellular phone in about a year ago, but was arrested in Houston. Velasquez is using Manor’s sentence, which was handed down Thursday, as an example.
“We’ve come back here and I’ve let the staff know about it and the offenders need to know about it,” he said. “They’re going to think twice before they start doing it again.”
Yenne said she offered Manor 15 years but he turned it down.
“He refused,” she said. “He wanted to see what a jury would think.”
Manor was serving 32 years for stealing a car in 1993. That sentence was running concurrently with a 15-year sentence for aggravated robbery, aggravated kidnapping, burglary and theft, said Philip Hall, an assistant district attorney who prosecutes prison crimes in Brazoria County.
On top of those sentences, Manor was convicted of possession of marijuana in 2002 while in Darrington and was sentenced to four years stacked on his 32-year sentence. Hall said he doesn’t know how Manor got the phone or if he made any calls on it.
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