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If you are a thief, don't try to sell your stolen guns at a gun show!

10K views 95 replies 53 participants last post by  Coleman 
#1 ·
This guy has a laundry list of prior arrests. Literally 17 arrests for burglary in the past 6 years. The Sheriff's office considers him a serial burglar. Yet with all those arrests, he was still out on the streets and stealing guns. If only they enforce the laws that are on the books and put these guys away for a length of time.

Anyhow, this guy had a small collection of guns he stole and he was trying to sell them at a local gun show. Someone recognized the items as belonging to a friend of his that lost it in a burglary. He alerted a Sheriff's deputy at the show, and that set off an investigation. They obtained a search warrant and found a cache of stolen weapon. He is being held on no bond... but with these liberal; Judges I expect this guy to be out again by next year.


http://miami.cbslocal.com/2015/08/19/bso-man-leads-bso-to-burglar-stolen-weapons/
Singer was arrested on August 16th after he tried to sell the stolen weapons at the Pompano Beach Gun & Knife Show on Sunday. He had allegedly approached various attendees with pictures of vintage bayonets dating back to World War I and somone recognized the items as belonging to a friend.
and

“We walked into the bedroom and we saw all these weapons and all the other electronics and we were blown away. It was that large of a scene,” said Jack Vaccaro with Lighthouse Point Police.
 
#3 ·
You know I think that the constitutional amendment.

Against cruel and unusual punishment is probably a good one. However there is a big temptation to make exceptions sometimes. :barf:
 
#6 ·
The libtards actually think it's cheaper to release career criminals early... cheaper for who??? :confused:

I don't want to get too political here but one thing I've noticed is there are a lot of disenfranchised people out there that are tired of the status quo. I know I am.
 
#7 ·
You are not the only one.



It is about time to make the house and Senate minimum wage jobs.
 
#9 ·
it's called lets make a deal. The property is recovered and the bad guy pleads guilty to get lesser time in jail. This is not a political thing and it is not necessary to call people names, 21/503. The justice system, regardless which party is in charge, makes deals with the guilty all the time.
 
#10 ·
I'd like to see property criminals do fairly long sentences involving labour - the very thing they're thieving to avoid. But it's a lot more complicated than that.

When I was a cop, my home was burglarized and a couple of handguns were stolen. To shorten a long story, being a cop helped to string the whole story together. He had also B&E'd several other people in my complex, working his way from the top to the bottom floors. I found this out after the fact, talking with my neighbors. The investigating cop hadn't even bothered to follow up on one of my bags found in one of the other units - his MO was to take a bag to put the stolen items in, then grab a bigger bag in the next unit to hold even more stuff. My discarded bag had my address on it - in the same complex. The cop didn't even bother to follow up with that address in the same unit... professional stupidity at its finest.

Anyways, the B&E boys just happened to be talking in the office one day about this habitual offender they had just taken down. I put two and two together and then I had the identity of the guy who did my place. They have him for over 300 B&E's; the deal is he is going to plead guilty to five - now six now that I am there raising hell - in exchange for identifying all the B&Es he has done they can't tie him to. He gets clear of possible future prosecution for those B&E's, they get to close a whole bunch of outstanding files they could probably never solve by evidence and charge. The reality of police business as usual where you have five cops dealing with a volume of work that realistically should have thirty cops assigned to deal with.

Approached the prosecutor as a victim, said I wanted to submit a victim impact statement and ask for a restitution order. Victim impact statements invariably result in longer sentences - so ask why prosecutors don't aggressively seek them from victims. "Oh, okay, we'll do that". Nothing heard after that, so I started watching the court lists. My guy comes up for his trial and I haven't heard from the prosecutor. Call them up again "Oh right, yeah, okay...". Still nothing heard, so I took matters into my own hands.

I ran off his record. The ultimate serial criminal. About fifteen years of crime, starting almost immediately after his adult birthday, which tells you he was a juvie criminal as well (which you can't see). Conviction, sentence, probation, violation of probation, conviction, sentence, jail, parole, offence, conviction, sentence, violation of parole, etc. Fifteen years with the only breaks in committing crimes being the times he is actually in a jail.

So off to the courthouse I go with his record in my hand - something an ordinary citizen would never see, never mind be allowed to have in their hands. Buddy comes in, the prosecutor and the defense make a joint submission to the judge saying buddy is going to plead guilty to six B&Es, and a sentence of two years that includes a drug treatment plan is appropriate. So here's the judge looking at this deal, and even if he did know that buddy had also committed those other 294 B&Es, he can't take judicial notice of what the lawyers as officers of the court haven't put in front of him. Two years won't even have him doing federal time.

So I stand up and interrupt the court and tell the judge I am a victim and I want to make a victim impact statement. In fact, I have repeatedly told the prosecutor that I wanted to make a victim impact statement but he has never got back to me. The prosecutor doesn't look happy with me. The defense doesn't look happy with me. But the judge says yes, as you would expect.

I give the judge a brief outline of what had happened, how many B&Es this guy actually committed, how many victims, etc, aside from the six that have come up at trial. Then I start reading the judge his record. The defense freaks out, says the judge should not be hearing this and I should have never gotten access to buddy's criminal record. I point out my unstated job allows me to see these records. The judge says it is a victim impact statement so I can say almost anything I want.

To shorten a long story, instead of a two year sentence in a nice little minimum security jail, he got 14 years in a federal pen. And I got a restitution order. He absolutely freaked out at that - had never gotten more than 18 months for any and all of his convictions before that. I kind of enjoyed that - and I made a point of telling him I would be seeing him around when he got out as he was led away.

And then I made a complaint to the prosecutor's boss, complete with the evidence of the numerous times I had asked to do a victim impact statement, in a time when policy was to aggressively pursue obtaining getting those statements. And hounded that complaint every step of the way. I don't recall them getting fired, but I'm sure it made their life hell for a few months.

He got paroled after 11 years. Again, despite the fact I had stayed in touch with Corrections and ensured they had a note on my file to advise me when he was released, nobody contacted me to tell me he was now out where I could attempt to serve the restitution order. Found out because I kept track of him; if I hadn't been in the business, I would have never found out.

Turned out he had been placed in a job as a labourer, had used his pen money and first paycheque or so to buy a car to commute to work. Made an appointment with his parole officer, showed her a copy of the restitution order, and asked her how she intended to have him pay it. She said she wouldn't do that - it would be too damaging to his psyche to have to pay it while attempting a clean start. Yes, she really did say that. I pointed out she was an officer of the court and it was a court order, and therefore she was obligated to enforce it as he was under her jurisdiction. She said she didn't care.

So, being in the business and knowing a bit about how the law works, I went and got another court order. Tracked down where he was working. Had the bailiff's seize his car at the worksite as well as serve his employer with an order to garnishee his wages. I made sure I was there so I could smirk and say "remember me" when he came running up to find out why the tow truck was putting the hook on his car.

So, it took about a decade, but I finally got justice and restitution for the burglary and theft of my handguns.

I told the long story to address the issue of who is to blame for creatures like this running around free to victimize more people.

Is it the cops who don't do a full and proper investigation of crimes? Well, it was a lousy investigation, but as a cop at the time I know that I usually went on shift backed up on seven or eight calls before I even stuck the keys in the ignition. Getting an ident man to a B&E scene was a joke, they were about as scarce as unicorns - had to be a really serious crime to get ident man time. Nobody wants to hire and pay for more cops and more resources until they're the victims. They want to make jokes about cops and doughnut shops instead, not bothering to discuss the reason you're eating in the crappy doughnut shop together is because there aren't enough cops to relieve you for lunch so you can go back to the office to eat and discuss cases with the other cops in your area.

How about the cops who give buddy immunity on hundreds of other crimes in exchange for confessing to six? Well, they can't even begin to keep up with their case load and would never have even cleared all those hundreds of others anyways because they don't have time to investigate properly. Go ahead and be the section NCO who asks for a couple of dozen additional cops to add to the few you already have - be prepared to have the chief laugh in your face and ask you what kind of meds you're on.

Well then, it must be the prosecutors cutting the deals, who don't put in the time and legwork to get victim impact statements. Well, most of those prosecutors are relatively new guys out of law school who are being paid less by the state than a tradesman makes. The defense lawyer usually did the prosecutor job before they got burned out and gave up, so they know how the prosecutor works. So there's the prosecutor with about eighty files sitting on his desk. He's going to read the paperwork, but for a B&E is going to have maybe five minutes with the cops and witnesses before the trial starts.

... to be continued...
 
#11 ·
... continued ...

So it goes something like this: the defense calls the prosecutor and goes "Hi, welcome to the trade. I see you want to charge buddy with 300 B&Es; tell you what, we'll plead guilty to six of those. You don't have any evidence on the rest and he already has immunity. So let's say two years in minimum security with a drug treatment program, because he is a druggy." Our heroic young prosecutor goes "No way! This is a very bad man - look at his record and the number of victims! Six or seven years at least in the fed pen". The defense then responds "Look kid, here's how it is. I used to sit in your desk and I know you have about eighty files sitting in front of you on any given day. After court time is taken from your work week, I know how much time you have to prepare for each of those cases. I am sitting here with just a handful of cases, and I have a couple of articling young lawyers working for me who are just looking for something to do. If you fight this, I am going to use them to bury you in detail, minutiae, and case law - you won't get ANY conviction. So get smart and take what I'm offering you."

The new prosecutors usually swim mightily like salmon against the stream, trying to do the job they way they were taught to do it. After three or four months of putting in 60 and 70 hour weeks, all that overtime unpaid and on their evenings and weekends, they usually capitulate and just try and do the best they can with what they have.

Now, who do you see demanding that we hire more prosecutors, enough so that every single trail is an even contest as far as resources and time between the prosecutor and the defense?

So maybe it is liberal judges then? Well they exist, obviously. But they are also bound by issues like not having the full story disclosed to them by the prosecutor and defense due to a legal agreement they have made. And they're bound by stare decisis - you can't be a hard ass judge handing out twenty year sentences for B&E when the standard sentence for the same kind of offence is getting two years from the rest of the judges. You have to discern differences in the case before you to hand out longer sentences.

I could go on to corrections, parole, etc., but this is already overly long.

The point is we find it easy to blame liberals, weak judges, predatory lawyers, uncaring cops, whatever. But the whole system has spun out of control, and at every level from the responding street cop all the way through to the parole officers, the system as it is now is almost designed to fail the victim and minimize the sanctions on the offender every step of the way. About the only justice system I know of that works is the military justice system - and that is precisely because the military justice system does not lack for sufficient people at all levels.

Which is also why the recidivism rate for prisoners of the military justice system is just a small fraction of the recidivism rate for prisoners of the civilian justice system.

And all of that is before some governments decide they are simply not going to enforce some laws, no matter what their oath of office and the rule of law says.

Pretty sick, huh?
 
#15 ·
Amen, locally, our prosecutor seems to plea bargain away ANY gun charges that went with the original crime.

What's the point of getting laws passed that put more criminal charges for using a gun in the commission of a crime if the charges are just going to get plea bargained away?

Everyone wants to be tough on gun crime...smdh
 
#16 ·
People say "there should be a law about this" when there's a problem of some kind.

The politicians, per their job, hop right to it & write a bill. Once it's been voted in as law, then the people & their politicians feel like they've "done something positive" to solve the problem.

They then go home happy, satisfied that they are Making A Difference.

Whether or not anything changes is immaterial.
 
#19 ·
Don't blame the police who did their job. Don't blame the judge who is probably bound to mandatory sentence requirements. Blame the lazy prosecutors, who are overworked, but have learned to play the system to get out of as much work as possible. They chose to be there. The sharp attorneys opened their own practice. Kinda like Medical School when it comes close to graduating time and they are competing for specialties. Guess who gets to be the proctologist?
 
#22 ·
As Jager so eloquently points out - the Criminal Justice System is a closed system. The Prisons are full. If you take more in you have to let others out. Solutions are either more cells, send them to an island (British approach) or figure out a way to end criminal behavior that doesn't require incarceration. And, the criminals are well aware of all this.
 
#24 ·
Jager, thank you for taking the time to write that long eye opening story. It explains why a lot of things are screwed up in our justice system. And thank you also for seeing that 'buddy' had to serve 11 years of active time in the federal pen and that he had to pay you for what he stole.

Every day I hear the media say how we have "too many" people locked up in this country. I suspect we don't have enough people locked up, at least not the right ones.
 
#26 ·
Wow---I knew it was bad---I didn't know it was THIS BAD---thank you, Jager for the inside view---no wonder citizens suffer so much repeat crime. Here in Kalifornia, we have a three-strikes law---except the Lib Pukes have taken all the teeth out of it---and now the stupid folks have approved Prop. 47 basically a get out of jail for free card unless you do something really violent---property crimes mostly don't count so house break-ins, car break-ins have shot thru the roof and nobodies doing anything about it...
 
#27 ·
I can tell you right now... If we had caning. The jails would not be overcrowded. That stuff works. Most of those clowns would be one and done criminals.
 
#31 ·
Having spent a lot of time in Singapore.



I can attest to the effectiveness of caning. Amazingly enough they still get enough of these miscreants floating around to make it a pretty regular occurrence. Apparently there are some pretty desperate people running around over there.
 
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