ATTORNEY Richard Miller told the federal court that his client Vickilyn Manglona Teregeyo is not asking for compassionate release for her own convenience “as the [U.S.] government insinuates.”
He said she is making the request in the best interest of the daughter she is about to give birth to, as well as her own health and safety in the period immediately preceding and following labor.
In his response to the U.S. government’s opposition to Teregeyo’s request for compassionate release, Miller said:
“She is a mother who doesn’t want to be forcibly separated from her new daughter within hours of giving birth. Reincarceration after her release from the hospital would entirely separate her and her daughter during the first crucial weeks of the newborn’s life. That cannot be a healthy thing psychologically for the mother and developmentally for the child.”
As to the effect of his client’s early release, Miller said the circumstances today are markedly different from those in 2018 in Guam, in the case mentioned by the U.S. government.
There, she was granted pretrial release without restrictive conditions, Miller said.
In this case, she has already been sentenced. “If the court releases her from the Department of Corrections, she will go straight into home detention with electronic home monitoring. Her movements will be closely monitored within a house that the Probation Office has already inspected, and her access to others will be severely restricted,” Miller said.
He said if his client were in Bureau of Prisons custody, she would have recourse to programs that would allow her and the baby to be in contact.
“Instead, she’s caught in a Catch-22, where neither the Bureau nor the U.S. Marshals nor [CNMI Corrections] has authority to assist,” he said.
“The extent to which she falls through the cracks of the system were not apparent at the time she was sentenced last month. They are woefully visible now,” Miller added.
Teregeyo is eight months pregnant.
For his part, Assistant U.S. Attorney Garth Backe said the defendant is now in a worse position to request compassionate release because: (a) the laboratory analysis of her urine sample taken at her revocation hearing on March 25, 2022 confirmed she had methamphetamine in her system; and (b) methamphetamine was found inside her jail cell on March 27, 2022.
Backe also told the court that the U.S. government will present evidence at the hearing on April 27.
On Tuesday, the court rescheduled the hearing for May 6 at 9 a.m.
District Court for the NMI Chief Judge Ramona V. Manglona recently revoked the supervised release of Teregeyo after the defendant admitted that she used methamphetamine.
Judge Manglona sentenced Teregeyo to serve a term of three months’ imprisonment, followed by three months of home confinement/detention with electronic location monitoring as a special condition of supervised release, and followed by 27 months of supervised release.
On Guam, Teregeyo was convicted of the offense of drug user in possession of firearm and ammunition, and was allowed by the federal court system to serve her probation in the CNMI.
She was sentenced by Guam District Court Chief Judge Frances M. Tydingco-Gatewood on May 24, 2019 to time served, 12 months and 18 days, with a three-year term of supervised release.
Teregeyo’s supervised release was previously set to expire on May 23, 2022.
