Pa. Man Sentenced 8 Years Later for DUI
|
|
A man was sentenced to house arrest for drunken driving and drug charges eight years after his paperwork somehow got lost in a bureaucratic shuffle, authorities said. Douglas Gast, 33, was belatedly sentenced Tuesday to 30 days of house arrest for DUI, possessing marijuana and possessing drug paraphernalia in what Cumberland County President Judge Edgar B. Bayley called “the lost case.” Gast was upset when he received a notice in July that prosecutors wanted to send him to jail, said defense attorney Gregory Abeln. “He thought this was over with,” Abeln said. “Then out of the blue he gets a letter telling him to come to court.” Gast had originally faced up to 23 months in county prison after he was convicted in 1998. The state Superior Court denied his appeal the following year. Gast tried to turn himself in after that, but prison officials said they didn’t have the paperwork on his case, Abeln said. “They had no record of him,” Abeln said. “So he got turned away.” Abeln said that a probation officer had told him Gast would be notified by mail about when to report to prison, but he never received that notice. It turned out that authorities never began the process to commit Gast to jail because the district attorney’s office said it never received official word that his appeal was denied, according to court records. Somehow, Gast’s paperwork resurfaced over the summer, but District Attorney David Freed said he didn’t know how it was found. Advances in technology have made it easier for authorities to track cases more closely, he said. Gast, who has not been charged with any crimes since his 1997 arrest, could not be reached for comment Friday because his home telephone number is unlisted. Prosecutors had wanted Gast to spend at least some time in prison. Bayley placed him under house arrest instead, allowing him to leave only to go to work. “That’s a fair resolution,” Freed said. |