Adrienne Dumas failed the twice-daily court-ordered testing on a home alcohol monitoring machine 183 times in less than two months, without consequences to her probation.
Her daily lapses were not reported to the Fayette County judge who sentenced her.
On May, 2, 2010, she was found dead in her Fayetteville apartment, possibly four days after she died. No one had noticed she had not used her alcohol monitoring machine for days.
An insulin-dependant diabetic, Dumas drank herself to death even though she was under court orders not to have any alcohol at all.
Dumas’ circumstances seem to illustrate a point made by opponents of the thriving private probation industry — that it is more about profits than supervision.
Dumas was convicted of drunken driving in Fayette County three times in three years, once registering almost three times the legal limit. Just weeks after home alcohol monitoring was ordered, Dumas failed her test on March 7, 2010. She would continue to fail 182 tests.
None of those failures were reported to JCS or to the judge.
“It was a complete lack of oversight and supervision,” said attorney Jeff Goleb, who has filed a lawsuit against Judicial Correction Services on behalf of Dumas’ 7 1/2-year-old son, claiming JCS did not supervise the 32-year-old mother as it was supposed to do. Although her death was the result of complications of diabetes, her family maintains the alcohol she consumed contributed to her death.
JCS chief executive officer Robert McMichael declined to comment for this article, but he has said previously private probation providers often do a better job supervising probationers than government-run programs, and they do it at no cost to taxpayers.
The state’s second largest private probation provider says on its website JCS “ensures our officers have the time and the support they need” to help probationers fulfill “their requirements to the court and beyond.”
While a Fulton Superior Court judge has ruled JCS had no duty to protect Dumas from herself, that decision has been appealed. The record compiled in the suit describes her swift slide down a path a judge’s order strictly prohibited while the probation company that was charged with supervising her seemingly did nothing.
According to JCS logs, family members told the company several times Dumas was drinking in violation of her probation.
Her ex-husband and her mother desperately tried to get help from the private probation officer who was assigned to supervise Dumas.
They felt revoking her probation would save her. In jail, she couldn’t get more bottles of vodka and drink herself into oblivion.
“She honestly felt safer in jail where she was unable to drink,” said Dumas’ sister, Alicia Harris.
Relatives don’t know how she obtained alcohol at home, even though she wore an ankle monitor that was supposed to alert the company if she left her apartment.
At the same time, the business that provides twice-daily alcohol monitoring never told JCS of the times Dumas failed a test or tried to rig the machine to show positive results. And JCS never asked the monitoring company about Dumas, according to records.
Dumas had admitted her drinking problems. “She was not proud of it,” said her sister Harris. “I thought, ‘There is no way she can beat the system.’ If they (JCS) had responded, Adrienne would be alive.”
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