PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The last of 10 Americans detained while trying to take 33 children out of Haiti after the Jan. 12 earthquake was freed Monday when a judge convicted her but sentenced her to time already served in jail.
Laura Silsby, the organizer of the ill-fated effort to take the children to an orphanage being set up in the neighboring Dominican Republic immediately left the country for the U.S.
The Idaho businesswoman had been in custody since Jan. 29. She was originally charged with kidnapping and criminal association, but those charges were dropped for her and the nine other Americans who were previously released. Silsby she was convicted of arranging illegal travel under a 1980 statute restricting movement out of Haiti.
Silsby told the court she thought the children were orphans whose homes were destroyed in the earthquake. But she lacked the proper papers to remove them from the country.
An AP investigation later revealed all the children had at least one living parent, who had turned their children over to the group in hopes of securing better lives for them.
Silsby and others in the group, mostly members of the same Baptist church in Idaho, insisted they had only come to Haiti to help. They unwittingly helped draw attention to the dark side of the adoption industry in Haiti, where children for many years have been abandoned by their parents or sold into slavery.
In February, a Haitian judge released eight of the Americans after concluding they had not knowingly engaged in any crime. The judge released a ninth member, Silsby’s friend and former nanny, Charisa Coulter, in March.
Silsby was held the longest because she organized the venture and prosecutors insisted she knew that she did not have the proper authorization to take the children out of Haiti.
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