State prisons employee catches mistakes on release forms

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Posted 7:17AM on Wednesday, January 1, 2003

DECATUR - A misspelled name and a boastful claim on phony court orders helped keep two inmates behind bars after they tried to fake their way out of prison, DeKalb County officials said. Alonzo Morefield and Stewart Pullin were placed in solitary confinement at Smith State Prison in Glennville in southeast Georgia while authorities try to find the source of the fake orders to release them. ``Their timing was either lucky or they knew the system,'' District Attorney J. Tom Morgan said Monday. ``They nearly got away with it.'' Morefield, 34, an Ohio prison escapee, was convicted in 2001 of kidnapping, assault, attempted escape and other charges and sentenced to 19 years in prison with no parole. Pullin, 41, of Stockbridge, was convicted in 2001 of manslaughter, assault and burglary and was not eligible for parole until 2053. One of the supposed court orders arrived on Christmas Eve and the other on Friday. Susan Roberson, a Department of Corrections court liaison officer in Atlanta, became suspicious. ``These orders read funny to her. They didn't exactly make sense,'' said Corrections Department spokeswoman Peggy Chapman, who described Roberson as a ``stickler for detail.'' On Morefield's ``release,'' for example, the name of Assistant District Attorney John Petrey was misspelled as ``Petry.'' The bogus court order also stated that Morefield was being given an early release as part of a plea agreement for helping prosecutors convict former DeKalb Sheriff Sidney Dorsey for ordering the murder in December 2000 of his elected successor, Derwin Brown. Morefield had told prosecutors and reporters that Dorsey had tried to hire him to kill Brown. But prosecutors didn't believe Morefield. When Roberson contacted Morgan about the two release letters on Friday, Morefield's name jumped out at the district attorney as being a phony.