Patricia Barrett, a special-needs teacher in Providence, spent her 53rd birthday in the ACI. She spent her birthday and 13 other days in September in prison because of a bizarre legal pileup in which evidence was never heard, the system was apparently manipulated and a ridiculous Rhode Island law was applied that sends people to prison without requiring proof that they did anything wrong.

“I felt I was in The Wizard of Oz,” says Barrett.

But she wasn’t. She was in the Rhode Island legal system. And it not only failed her, it beat her up. It left her having to lie to stay out of prison, then having to go to prison because she couldn’t live with the lie.

She is out now, back teaching. But it could all happen again. It is absurdly, frighteningly easy for someone to use the system in pursuit of payback.

“It’s foreign to me,” says Casby Harrison, “how a person can be assumed guilty until proven innocent. But that’s what this statute does.”

Harrison took Barrett’s case at the request of a friend after Barrett’s first lawyer stopped returning phone calls. And he has found more questions than answers.

“I don’t understand how the police can take the plaintiff’s word over hers,” he says.

I can’t either. But that’s just one of the questions. No matter the charges that have been made and whether they have any merit at all, what’s so striking about Barrett’s situation is that so little real proof has been provided of anything. And so little proof has been required to put her in the middle of total judicial madness.

It all started with a boyfriend. She met him three years ago. He seemed appealingly goofy, well-dressed, sort of attractive. He moved in to the house in North Smithfield where she lived with her 15-year-old daughter. Her brother Kevin lived in a separate apartment in the house. Kevin, who introduced them, would sometimes come for supper.

The relationship went sour. The boyfriend had some very bad habits. She told him to leave. There was a physical confrontation, and she says she broke away and ran to a neighbor’s house.

She took out a restraining order. It was later made permanent after a brief hearing in District Court. Her former boyfriend responded by going downstairs in the courthouse and seeking a restraining order against her, claiming she had pushed him down some stairs.

Late last year, his restraining order was denied.

“I thought it was over,” says Barrett.

Actually, it was just beginning. Earlier this summer, he sought another restraining order, this time claiming she had yelled at him while he was mowing his lawn and had slapped him.

It was back to District Court for another hearing. But the judge left a temporary restraining order in place and postponed the hearing for 45 days. The delay left the legal door open. Barrett’s boyfriend, who had moved to Cumberland to live with his parents, walked into the Cumberland Police Department three months ago and played a recording of a phone message that he said was from Barrett. If it was, the call violated the temporary restraining order.

That’s all it took.

“The Cumberland police called me,” she says. “Kevin and I went in. I was arrested. The police were very sweet. They put me in a holding room, then an office, instead of a cell.”

She denied she made the call.

This is nuts. How can anyone say for certain whose voice is on a recorded phone message? It’s the question Casby Harrison asks and so far there has been no good answer.

Barrett was arraigned on a charge of violating the temporary restraining order. She pleaded not guilty and was released on personal recognizance.

Then the craziness got cranked up a notch. The ex-boyfriend claimed she had again violated the temporary restraining order with phone calls on three successive days in August

She was arraigned again. She pleaded not guilty. The judge ordered her cuffed and taken to the ACI. Even though she had been convicted of nothing, she was found in violation of the terms of her release at the previous arraignment.

She was put in a holding cell. She was coming apart emotionally.

Then the craziness got cranked up still another notch. Her lawyer, her first lawyer, told her, if she wanted to go home, she would have to go back into court and plead guilty. That way she could be given a non-prison sentence and sent on her way.

She went back and pleaded nolo contendere. She lied. She was freed.

That same day, her lawyer went to another hearing on that temporary restraining order that had started the whole legal train wreck. It was dismissed, which meant the original delay in hearing it had led to the fiasco that followed.

Barrett was physically sick. She called her brother and said she needed help. He took her to Butler Hospital, then to Miriam Hospital.

Then she went home and realized she couldn’t let her phony plea stand. She did something amazing. She called the School Department and arranged for emergency leave. She arranged for her daughter to stay with a friend. Then she went back to court and changed her plea back to what she knew to be the truth. She was sent to the ACI for 14 days.

She was back in court again after she got out. This time, it was a trial for those three phone calls she allegedly made in August. A judge dismissed two of them but somehow came up with the ability to positively identify her voice on the third. She was placed on probation, which leaves her vulnerable to still more artful legal tricks.

There are more court appearances ahead, and one very crucial piece of police work yet to be completed. The police still have to check phone records to see where the calls actually came from. According to Casby Harrison, one of the calls has actually been traced not to Barrett, but to an acquaintance of her boyfriend in Woonsocket.

Patricia Barrett has been badly damaged with almost nothing proven against her. She wants to change a law that let’s people be sent to prison without being found guilty. She’ll talk to anybody. She wants to talk to the governor. He should listen. He vetoed legislation this year that would have gone a long way toward correcting this kind of travesty.

bkerr@projo.com