Former New York prison employee Joyce Mitchell is expected to be sentenced on Monday, exactly two months after she pleaded guilty to helping two convicted murderers escape from a maximum-security prison.
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The pair eluded more than 1,000 searchers who combed the thick woods and bogs of northern New York for much of the next three weeks.
“This is by far the worst mistake I have made in my life”, Mitchell added, noting that she only helped Sweat and Matt because they threatened to kill her husband. Sweat was wounded by a state police trooper two days later.
Mitchell admitted becoming close with the pair while she worked as an instructor in the prison tailor shop.
She later told NBC news she had no doubt Matt and Sweat would have killed her if she had met them with a vehicle and a shotgun, as planned.
Mitchell has also been cooperating with state inspectors’ investigation into the prison escape. I can’t begin to explain how sorry I am for all this. In her tearful interview, she expressed her remorse for her role in the escape.
Sobbing throughout the court appearance, Mitchell begged Judge Kevin Ryan for forgiveness, saying she never meant to cause anyone harm in the remarkable June 6 escape.
“I couldn’t tell anybody”, Mitchell told Lauer.
In July, she entered a guilty plea to charges of promoting prison contraband in the first degree, a felony and criminal facility, a misdemeanor charge. They cut holes in their cells, hacked their way through underground pipes and tunnels and crawled out through a manhole.
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David Sweat, the only inmate left alive after the manhunt, also faces charges in the escape plot; he is already serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. Officials said he gave the two prisoners frozen hamburger meat Mitchell used to hide the hacksaw blades she smuggled to Sweat and Matt.
