The Last Day

They made a logo for the cover company

Today, was my last day! I didn’t really do anything too interesting other then watch a few court hearings. The first court was a sentencing for (drug) money laundering. Since the criminal, the first female criminal I’ve seen in court, laundered over $100,000, and it was her first offense, the recommended sentence was three to four years. The criminal also did not speak English so the court provided her with a Spanish translator. Last week when I was watching court, I saw a sentencing of a drug trafficker who had two families, one in Cleveland and one in Phoenix. Interestingly enough, the criminal I watched today was his Phoenix girlfriend ( the court calls her a “paramour” though).

I felt very sorry for the female criminal. By the time she found out her boyfriend was a drug trafficker she already had two of his children. (Now they have four). The trafficker physically abused her, which is part of the reason she signed the bank statements for the laundering company, XYZ Insurance.

The defense attorney argued she should be let out on parole since she was not a danger and had four children to raise alone. She had broken up with her boyfriend who would be in prison for a long time. The prosecutor said she should have the recommended sentence since she laundered a large amount of money that all came from the sale of heroin and fentanyl. The judge was sympathetic and sentenced her to only four months in prison, (32 months off the minimum recommended sentence).

A sad sentencing

              

**Trigger Warning: Talking about Sex Crimes**

Today was pretty similar to last Friday in terms of what I did. I went through applications for the group award of the Marshal’s Service for the entire nation. Groups ranged from task forces, to fugitive hunting groups, to groups that protected individuals like the Secretary of Education. My favorite group was a fugitive squad that worked in Washington (state), Oregon, and Alaska. Their main focus was on locating fugitive sex offenders. In the past year they’ve arrested around seven hundred fugitive sex offenders, with about thirty percent of them having committed crimes against children.

                In addition to reading applications, I also watched an interesting sentencing. The criminal was found to have four hundred and three child pornography videos on his computer. Although this may not seem like a lot, in court child porn is counted in photos not videos. So four hundred and three videos equals over thirty thousand images. Some of the videos were of toddlers and infants. (That means additional time added to the recommended sentence.) Since the pedophile was a first time offender the recommended sentence was twelve and a half years to fifteen and a half years, with a mandatory five year minimum.

                I was absolutely disgusted when the defense attorney stood up and began arguing that the defendant should receive the minimum. She even said that she, “was saddened that there was a minimum because the defendant shouldn’t have to spend that much time in jail.” I am fine with that argument when it applies to marijuana dealers (which is when you usually hear this argument). Because dealing marijuana doesn’t harm anyone; it is a victimless crime with a high minimum. But guess what? Watching child porn, no not child porn, toddler porn hurts innocent children. The attorney’s arguments for the defendant were that he had a rough childhood (schizophrenic mother and absent father) and that he has Aspergers. The attorney said that because of his illness he would have a, “harder time in prison.” The judge literally laughed when she said that, and then said that, “most people, especially pedophiles have a hard time in prison.”

                Then the prosecution presented their arguments. The first one was that the defendant wasn’t actually diagnosed with Aspergers. That argument was shut down pretty quickly when the defense produced the diagnosis report from a psychiatrist from when the defendant was five. The prosecution’s next argument was that the defendant should get the recommended sentence since he is a menace to society. First in the obvious way that he buys child porn, which makes a market for it, which means children have to be raped. But second, when the defendant confessed to his crime, in his statement, he said how he once “touched” a seven year-old on the hand and got off to it later. The prosecution argued this was him escalating from the internet to real life.

                The judge decided that because the defendant had Aspergers, he would have a harder time in prison, so he gave the defendant the minimum five years.

                I’ve known for a long time that the criminal justice system has some flaws but I am honestly blown away by its failure today.

Weed and Awards

My Workspace

                Friday was one of my favorite days I’ve spent at the Marshal’s office. In the morning, I watched a sentencing hearing since it was a drug trafficker and I had yet to see one of those. The offender was a forty-five year old white man who had been bringing drugs (between 700 and 1000 kilograms of marijuana) from Honolulu, Hawaii to Cleveland. He had also created fake businesses and employees in order to funnel the drug money back to Hawaii. At the beginning of the sentencing things were not looking so good for him. His offender level was six; this is the highest and worst level. He had multiple past felony convictions for drug trafficking. The higher your offender level the longer your sentence. In addition to this the individual offence level was 32. Offence levels start at one and the higher they are the more serious the crime is. Also the longer the sentence is. The one thing this criminal had going for himself was that he appeared extremely wealthy. He was wearing a nice suit and appeared well groomed. He wasn’t in an orange jumpsuit, which meant that he could afford to be out on bail. In addition to all this, he had a hired defense attorney, not a public defender. His attorney was probably one of the best I’ve ever seen. He argued that the criminal should get below the recommended sentence because numerous states have legalized marijuana. This argument worked and the criminal got six and a half years when he was looking at probably fifteen.

                I was upset with this sentencing. It’s not that I think marijuana traffickers should get harsh sentences; I actually think it should be federally legalized. I’m upset because I know that if this criminal wasn’t white and rich, if he had a public defender, he probably would have gotten the maximum sentence.

Also My Workspace

                After the sentencing, I was assigned a new job at the office. Every year the government give out a number of awards to its federal employees. There are awards for districts, court security officers, taskforce officers, and a variety of other people and groups. Since Peter Elliot, our district’s Marshal, is one of the longest standing Marshals, he decides who receives the awards. But there are hundreds of applications for all of the awards, and each application mush be read through. So my job was to read through the applications and rank them.

                The applications were actually very interesting since they were all stories of what the Marshal’s across the country had done in the past year. In Southern California, they had busted a Mexican drug cartel and arrested over eighty-five members. In Maryland, the Marshal’s deputies provided security for the judge who ruled against Trump’s immigration ban. I think the most interesting applications by far though were those for the Court Security Officer. One officer had tackled a man who was using a metal statue to break the bullet-proof glass in front of the US Attorney’s office. The man spit in the officer’s eye and it turned out that he was HIV positive. In NYC, two other officers got off work and headed down into the subway to get home. A women had a medical emergency, passed out, and fell into the active subway tracks. The men jumped onto the tracks, not knowing if a train was coming, and saved the women’s life.

Maxes and Mins

Today I got to go to a really cool place. The feds call it the “mail room”. I picked up four boxes for the Marshal’s filled with new investigation folders. This might sound easy, but each box was twenty four pounds. The deputies were very impressed that I could carry them all. After that unpaided manual labor (it is almost like I’m in prison!) I watched some courts.

Felons can get six months

for smoking this

                The first case, a resentencing, was actually kind of heartwarming. The prison had originally been sentenced to fifteen years for felony gun possession, he had already served over eleven years. The federal maximum sentence for felony gun possession was recently changed to ten years, so they released the prisoner on time served.

Felons can get ten years

for having this

                Then I watched a sentencing which was not so pleasant. The criminal was a bank robber who was free on supervised release (which is basically parole). The man had been out of prisoner for two years already; his supervised release was for three years. He broke the terms of his release in six ways. He tested positive for marijuana, didn’t pay his restitution or court fees, got a job outside of the district he legally had to stay in, didn’t inform his parole officer of change of address, etc. He apologized to the court, and asked the judge to not send him to prison since he has a two month old baby. The judge was furious. She roasted him saying she gave him below the usual sentence for the bank robbery and didn’t send him back to prison when he had previously tested positive for marijuana. He started crying as did the mother of his child who was in the back of the courtroom. Then the judge sentenced him to the maximum six months.

Cars and Terrorism

Back to the Future car

                Today, Susan didn’t have any work for me to do, so she loaned me out to the forfeiture division of the Marshal’s office. The forfeiture division takes care of all objects seized from criminals. These objects range from jewelry, to cars, to houses. Every item was bought with illegal money (usually drug money) so while the criminal is taken to trial, the objects become the property of the government. Patty, the head of the forfeiture division, had me file payment receipts for the cars’ care. The Marshal’s office has literally hundreds of seized cars that all must be cared for so they don’t lose value. Most of the cars are just expensive cars (Audis, BMWs, Mercedes, etc.), but there are a few cool ones. The office possess the Ghost Buster’s van, the car from Back to the Future, and the Batmobile. These aren’t knockoffs; they are the literal cars from the movies.

Knife used in threats

The judge said it was big enough to, "kill a cow"

                After helping out the forfeiture office, I watched court. The most exciting case was a sentencing for terrorism. Not ISIS terrorism, domestic terrorism.  The criminal was actually a Chinese citizen here on a visa. He’s twenty-nine, has a masters, and a fulltime job as a software engineer. He had no criminal history (which isn’t surprising because criminals aren’t usually granted US Visas), and he got married in June. Soon after his marriage he began threatening his wife. He threatened to bomb their church. He sent her a picture of a large knife and said he was going to cut off her arms and legs with it. He threatened to bring a rifle and kill her and everyone else in the casino where she worked. He actually did a dry run at the casino and got a semi-automatic rifle through security. His wife was so terrified she couldn’t even come to the sentencing, instead her statement was read by the prosecution. She had to move to a different state, and because of fear that he would find her she has started balding. The judge, before sentencing, gave a large speech about the importance of threatening shooting at this time in our country. The judge sentenced him to seventeen months in prison and then deportation. He said he would have given more had it not been for the deportation.

White and Blue Collar Crimes

                Today, I did some more paperwork for Susan. When individual citizens want to sue a police officer, or the mayor, or the city, their filed suits are sent to the Marshal’s office. Then the office, aka me, mails the suits to the courts and person being sued. A majority of the time they are just mailed back to the Marshal’s office. Either because the allegations aren’t something that can legally be sued over (like one women who was suing the city because an officer gave her a ticket for parking in a handicapped space) or the person the individual is trying to sue doesn’t have a name (they think they can sue a police officer by referring to him as John Doe #1).

A nice poster that hangs in the office

                After the paperwork was finished I spent the majority of the day watching court cases. The first one was interesting. The 75 year-old man had a PhD and a JD which is unusual since most of the defendants are high school dropouts. The criminal worked as an attorney for forty years before retiring from law; after his retirement he started his own construction company. He funneled money from the business into a bank account that he made by stealing one of his employee’s identities. For a lot of years he did this without filing the funneled money as “personal income”. This means he didn’t pay taxes on it. The IRS caught up to him and now he is facing paying $144,500 in restitution and minimum six years in prison.

View from outside the courtroom

                After that case I witnessed a slightly less white color sentencing. The defendant was twenty-five years old, and had a few children who were in the courtroom. The criminal was imprisoned for masturbating on a random minor in a public transit station. While in prison, he used a prison computer to solicit sexual videos from a sixteen year-old. He even had the audacity to ask the teenage girl to send pictures of her sister. The defense attorney was arguing for the defendant, saying how great of a family man he was, no danger to the community, etc. The judge was not having it. The judge interrupted the defense attorney, reminding the court that this wasn’t the man’s first sex crime with a minor victim. The prosecution and defense had agreed on a plea bargain with a recommended sentence of 63-74 months. The judge said that proposal was ridiculous considering the crime and the repeat offender. The judge sentenced him to ninety months (seven and a half years).

A Parade

  Friday was the last day of Police Week. This meant that instead of everyone being at the office, we were marching in the police parade. Anyone you could consider police-ish was in the parade; marshals, Cleveland and other local police departments, national guards, other military, DEA, FBI, and Secret Service agents.  There were some random but interesting things. The FBI brought a helicopter and a tank. The Cleveland Police Department rode horses. There was a band of different police men wearing kilts and playing bagpipes. I was wearing kakis and the uniform US Marshal shirt that everyone else from the office was wearing.

                We marched, in a four by five formation, about half a mile down West Lakeside Avenue to the Fort Huntington Park. On the way I gave little kids US Marshal pins and stickers. It probably looked ridiculous to outsiders. Everyone else with the Marshal was ex-military, six-foot tall, and extremely muscular. And then there was short me who hasn’t worked out in months. Oh well. When we got to the park a deputy pointed out that every police person in the city was in this park that you could see perfectly from the windows of the prison that’s across the street. At the park there was a somber memorial for all of the local police who were killed while on duty. Their family members were all there, and some of them gave speeches.

                What upset me were the Black Lives Matter protesters. Don’t get me wrong, I support the movement. I think the phrases, “police lives matter”, or, “all lives matter”, are ridiculous.  (Police because they agreed to a job where they know their lives are at risk. All lives because all lives aren’t at risk.) If this parade and memorial had just been celebrating police, I would support the BLM protesters. But that wasn’t what the event was. The event was a memorial service for dead police men. There were hundreds of family members there crying over their lost loved ones. Having protesters there honestly reminded me of the religious protesters who show up to LGBTQ funerals. There are times and places for protesting; memorial services are neither.