Copyright Â© 2009 The Oklahoman

WEWOKA — Stephanie Sills says she has been strip-searched twice, repeatedly forced to pay for drug urinalysis tests and treated like garbage.

"I’ve kind of lost respect for the whole system,” she said. "It makes me feel dirty, filthy, unworthy, violated, raped.”

Sills, 41, said she finds her treatment by Wewoka police and Seminole County authorities shocking since she has not been convicted of anything.

Records show Sills has only been charged with a misdemeanor: driving under the influence of drugs.

It’s a crime she says she didn’t commit.

Blood test results last week showed she tested positive for barbiturates, but nothing else, Wewoka Police Chief Greg Brooks said.

Sills said she takes a prescription headache medicine that is a barbiturate, but her doctor told her she could safely drive.

Sills is discovering something many people find disturbing during their initial encounters with Oklahoma’s criminal justice system.

It will cost her more to try to prove her innocence — even if the charge eventually is dropped — than it would have cost her to plead guilty and pay the $328 ticket plus $435.40 in court costs that have accumulated.

The Oklahoma City resident said she already paid her attorney $750, and he wants $750 more to take the case to trial.

She said she also already paid more than $500 in drug-testing fees for random drug tests required as a condition of her being released pending trial.

The arrest

Rookie Wewoka police officer Tony Wilbourn stopped Sills about 2 a.m. July 19 at a highway intersection.

Sills said she was returning to Oklahoma City after visiting her mother at a Holdenville nursing home. Sills said she had been crying.

Wilbourn reported he decided to pull her over when she stopped for several seconds in the middle of the intersection, after earlier stopping several feet short of the stop sign. His report mentions Sills "fumbled and dropped” documents while searching for her driver’s license and insurance form and says she was "extremely unsteady on her feet” as she got out of her car.

Sills said she fumbled the documents because her thumb was heavily bandaged due to an on-the-job injury and she was unsteady getting out of the car because she was trying to control her dog.

Wilbourn’s report states Sills had "extremely slurred speech, glassy watery eyes, and showed a lack of coordination.” The report also stated she failed field sobriety tests he gave her.

Sills said she had watery eyes because she had been crying.

Wilbourn said there was no indication Sills had been drinking, so he arrested her on a complaint of driving under the influence of drugs.

Wilbourn was new on the police force and had not gone through police certification training. But he told The Oklahoman two officers assisted him, and one was a "drug recognition expert.”

She’s confident

Sills is confident she will be cleared, but she thinks the process is flawed.

A two-month delay by police before even submitting the blood sample to be tested is one of several irregularities found by The Oklahoman.

Brooks, Wewoka’s police chief, said it normally wouldn’t have taken that long for the blood to be driven or mailed to the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation lab for testing.

Two Seminole County deputies were shot and killed one week after Sills’ arrest, and it has affected Wewoka police operations, he said.

Sills’ blood sample remained forgotten until Sept. 17, when a prosecutor says he called police about the delay.

The next day, the blood sample arrived at the OSBI by mail, according to OSBI spokeswoman Jessica Brown. Because of a backlog, it has been taking 40 to 45 days to get samples tested, she said.

The delay might not be such a big deal, but Seminole County Associate District Judge Timothy Olsen requires Sills to call in daily to a supervisory program administered by drug court officials and to submit to random drug urinalysis testing as one of the conditions of her own-recognizance bond.

The judge said he just signed off on conditions that had been agreed to by the prosecutor and Sills’ attorney, Richard Butner.

"They’ve made me come in 19 times for drug tests at a cost of $30 apiece,” Sills said.

The drug tests have cost her more than $500, not counting the cost of the 120-mile round trip to Seminole for testing each time, she said.

A worker in the drug testing office, Tina Madkins, said she believes Sills was only tested three or four times at a cost of $90, but couldn’t be sure.

Cost not only issue

Sills said the arrest caused her to lose her job at a tribal casino, and she recently started back to school with plans to become a medical assistant.

Sills said her classes begin at 8 a.m. weekdays, but she is required to check in with the Seminole County monitoring program by 9 a.m. every day or she could be written up as having an administrative positive drug test.

Sills said she starts calling in at 5:30 a.m., but sometimes it has taken more than an hour to get through.

The drug-testing process is humiliating, she said, noting that she is required to expose private parts of her body on demand to workers so they can make sure she isn’t sneaking in a urine sample from outside.

Sills said she was strip-searched twice by female officers during two separate booking procedures following her arrest. The first strip search occurred when Sills was booked into the Wewoka city jail the night she was arrested.

She said she was released on bail about 12 hours later.

A few days after that, Sills said, she received a call from the Seminole County sheriff’s office informing her that she hadn’t been booked properly and asking her if she would drive back to Wewoka so she could be fingerprinted and booked through the sheriff’s office.

Upon arrival, Sills said she was booked, strip-searched and put in a holding cell for three hours before being released.

Brooks said the second trip would have been unnecessary if his employees had handled the first booking properly.

"We had a new person working who didn’t know the process,” he said.

Seminole County Undersheriff Jesse Naputi said Sills should not have been strip-searched again when she came to the sheriff’s office.

"I don’t know why she would even have been patted down or searched at all,” he said.

John Baker, the friend who initially bailed out Sills, said in addition to paying $2,000 bail, he had to pay a $25 booking fee and give Wewoka police $100 just to get a slip of paper so he could pay another $175 so he could get Sills’ car released.

"It was handled badly,” he said. "It was a typical small-town deal. ... It’s just a good-old-boy society.”