BANGOR – True love cost a couple three weeks in jail apiece and a separation that could last a lifetime.

Martin Ellis Crossno, 33, of Union, S.C., was sentenced Thursday in U.S. District Court to 21 days in jail for smuggling his Canadian fiancee into the country in the trunk of his green Ford Mustang.

That is the same sentence U.S. District Judge John Woodcock imposed in August on Dora Arlene Sauveur, 35, of Amherst, Nova Scotia.

Both had faced up to two years in jail and a fine of up to $250,000.

Under the federal sentencing guidelines, the recommended sentence for each was from zero to six months in jail and a fine of between $500 and $5,000.

Woodcock also ordered Crossno to pay a $500 fine and to be on supervised release for one year after he serves his sentence. He would not be able to leave the country during that time.

“All of us in this court can appreciate, from a human standpoint, the desire of people who love each other to be together,” Woodcock told Crossno, “but there is a right way and a wrong way to do things.”

Dressed in green slacks and an argyle sweater, the red haired Crossno answered the judge’s questions in a soft, Southern accent. Since his release on bail, he has not been able to find work and slept in the terminal at Bangor International Airport last night because he could not afford a motel room.

Because Sauveur was detained after her arrest, she was released in August and returned to Canada. Crossno told the court Thursday that he planned to move to Canada to marry her because she has been barred from entering the U.S. for 20 years.

Woodcock was skeptical Thursday that Canadian law would allow Crossno, now a convicted felon, to move to that country and marry Sauveur.

“The irony of this case,” the judge said, “is that you and your fiancee may be forced … to be apart.”

The couple was arrested on July 19 at the Houlton border crossing. Sauveur was denied entry to the U.S. and barred from re-entering the country for five years on July 14 when she and Crossno were returning from a visit with her two children in Nova Scotia. She was denied entry for overstaying her visit the previous year.

Sauveur left her husband and two sons and entered the U.S. on Mother’s Day 2004 when she went to North Carolina to live with a man she’d met over the Internet. After that relationship ended, she moved in with Crossno, whom she also met online.

Crossno and Sauveur were one of three couples caught crossing the border illegally this summer.