Lawyer in drug case to remain in prison during evaluations
D. Scott Perrine - the lawyer arrested last week after failing to appear at a hearing in his own drug case - will stay in prison while undergoing a psychiatric and drug evaluation, a city judge ruled yesterday.
D. Scott Perrine - the lawyer arrested last week after failing to appear at a hearing in his own drug case - will stay in prison while undergoing a psychiatric and drug evaluation, a city judge ruled yesterday.
Common Pleas Court Judge Joan Brown denied Perrine's strenuous arguments to let him go free and find his own treatment program. Brown, however, said she might let him be discharged directly from prison into an inpatient program if Perrine or his attorney can find one.
The judge set a hearing for Dec. 23 to check the status of Perrine's evaluation.
Perrine, 31, was arrested Friday at his home in Center City, three days after he failed to appear before Brown for a hearing involving his arrest last year for allegedly bringing cocaine into the city's Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility.
Perrine had been arrested Oct. 24, 2007, while visiting a client at Curran-Fromhold.
When prison officers searched Perrine's briefcase, authorities say, they found a small vial of cocaine. According to court records, Perrine said that another client's mother had given it to him and that he'd forgotten it was in his briefcase.
Coincidentally, Perrine is now housed at Curran-Fromhold, the same jail housing his most celebrated recent client: Pete Hopkins, 20, one of three men whose beating by Philadelphia police on May 5 was captured on video by a Fox29 news helicopter.
This was not Perrine's first incarceration. In May, a Dauphin County Court judge jailed him in the county prison in Harrisburg when he missed two hearings. Perrine then blamed his absence on his duties in the then-exploding police-beating case.
Yesterday, prosecutor E. Marc Costanzo argued that Perrine needs to remain in jail until after a psychiatric and drug and alcohol evaluation determines what has caused his recent unprofessional, bizarre behavior.
Costanzo is an assistant state attorney general assigned to the case because of the potential conflict of interests posed because Perrine is a Philadelphia criminal-defense lawyer and a former city prosecutor.
