A woman held in a halfway house for months beyond her original sentence because she could not pay a $705 fine was released Tuesday after an agreement between the state Department of Corrections and the Southern Center for Human Rights.

Ora Lee Hurley had been caught in a legal Catch-22 that kept her confined to the Gateway Diversion Center in Atlanta for eight months beyond her initial 120-day sentence for a probation violation.

"We're grateful to the Department of Corrections for taking immediate steps to remedy the problem," Southern Center lawyer Sarah Geraghty said after a five-minute hearing before Fulton County Superior Court Judge John Goger where the settlement was announced.

Geraghty had earlier called Hurley's dilemma "another debtor's prison case."

The 45-year-old Hurley will be turned over to law enforcement officials in Sumter County where she faces drug possession charges from July 2005, Geraghty said. Hurley was in the Atlanta diversion center for a 1991 probation violation stemming from another drug arrest.

She had paid $45 toward her $705 fine but was unable to come up with the remainder of the fine after paying the DOC $600 a month for room and board and spending $76 a month for other living expenses, her attorneys argued.

Hurley worked at a local restaurant for $6.50 an hour, returning to the halfway house at night.

Bill Amideo, general counsel for Corrections, said officials agreed to apply part of Hurley's rent payments to the agency toward her fine to resolve the case.

"We're looking at all the circumstances of the case," Amideo said. "We're going to look at the system to see if there are other cases like this that need to be addressed."

Geraghty said several people had called the Southern Center offering to pay Hurley's fine when they read of her plight in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.