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.

Heroin is Bad; Fentanyl is Worse

                Today overall wasn’t too interesting, but I did learn a few things. I spent a majority of the day checking through deputy files to make sure they hadn’t expired. A majority of the Marshal’s deputies are actually officers on loan from other bureaus (local, state, and federal) and so the officers have to be “deputized” every two years. Being “deputized” isn’t like being knighted by the Queen of England, its actually just filling out a bunch of paper work. But it is seen as a promotion for government employees. The only interesting part of checking the files was that I found a file for an officer who the computer system said didn’t exist. I asked Susan about the non-existent existent file and she told me a sad story. The officer had been working as a policeman for well over twenty years. If you googled his name you would find countless articles of dangerous criminals he caught and victims he helped. About a year ago he started dating a girl who was an ex-heroin addict. They moved in together. A few months later he caught her shooting up, and kicked her out of his house. A few weeks later, she overdosed and died. In January, the police started an inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the death. Even though the officer was a good guy, and no one suspected him of foul play; he has been put on leave until after the investigation is finished.

Heroin

                After I finished the files, I talked to a Marshal’s Deputy named Josh. Josh is in charge of all the criminal files, along with other normal deputy responsibilities like attending court hearings and transporting inmates. Josh kindly showed me an inmate file and explained all of the different forms and approval needed to sentence, incarcerate, and transfer prisoners. The file he was using in his explanation, was for a man who was just sentenced to over fifteen years for felony possession of a weapon. I knew that people found with illegal firearms could end up in prison, but I thought that over fifteen years seemed excessive. Josh explained that felony possession meant that the criminal was either on parole or probation which disallowed owning firearms. There is also a three strike law in Ohio where if you’re convicted of three drug related crimes, it is illegal to ever own a weapon once you’re released. The criminal was also sentenced to over fifteen years because he had an extensive criminal history; he would have gotten significantly less time if this was a first offence. Josh also explained that federal courts give longer sentences than local or state courts; what crimes specifically that get longer sentences are up to the federal judges.

Fentanyl

                Josh told me that lately the federal courts have been giving harsh sentences for fentanyl. Fentanyl is a drug that was synthesized in China; its cheap and over fifty times more potent then heroin. A piece small enough to fit on the tip of a pen is enough to kill the average person. Marshals in NYC arrested a man with six pounds of fentanyl; that is enough to kill everyone in the city. Heroin dealers mix fentanyl in with heroin they sell because customers still receive a high and the dealers are able to make more money. Josh said that every day in Cleveland three people die of an overdose. What the federal courts are doing, is if they find a dealer, they try to connect the drugs the dealer sold to an overdose death. Then the dealer is charged with murder in addition to dealing. A few weeks back, a twenty-one year old dealer was sentenced to twenty years in prison. Hopefully the long sentences will work as a deterrent.

Inmate Letters and the FBI

Today was another half day at the office since I had to take my AP English exam. When I got to the Marshal’s Service office some of the interns were already there, reading inmate letters. The letters were to the USMS from federal inmates in the district. The most noticeable characteristic about the letters were the numerous misspelled words. One prisoner even managed to misspell “rights”.  Most of the letters were from Mansfield Prison; you do not want to end up there. The letters were mostly about rights violations. Sewer overflows into cells. Hot cells without air conditioning. Overcrowding. Rotten eggs for breakfast. Lack of a law library. (The last is actually a right, the Supreme Court decided in Lewis v. Casey that all prisons must have access to an updated law library.)

An Inmate Letter

There was one letter though that was four pages long and particularly disturbing. The letter was from an inmate who had only one working leg after he was shot in the spine with a semi-automatic. In prison he had to use a wheelchair because he couldn’t walk. One day his wheelchair broke so he asked medical for a new one. They ignored him. He made a doctor’s appointment and waited months for it. He asked the doctor for a new wheelchair. The doctor wrote him up and he was sent to the “hole”. (Which I’m guessing means solitary?) They took his broken wheelchair and gave him a plastic chair. He sat in the chair constantly, because he couldn’t walk. He attempted to drag himself in the plastic chair to the toilet, but ended up falling out the chair and hitting his head on the metal toilet seat. Every day since he gets migraines and has blurry vision. He got out of the “hole”, but was given a cane. He falls every day, and still doesn’t have a wheelchair. He wrote the USMS and the US Disabilities Attorney, to call attention to this “cruel and unusual punishment” (a violation of the eighth amendment). I hope the attorney helps him.

Cleveland FBI Building

After reading letters I went to visit the Cleveland FBI office. The office is actually an entire building on the lakefront that the government rents for three hundred thousand dollars a month. Thanks tax payers. There is a lot of security to get into the FBI building; I had to send them my social security number a few days ago so they could perform a background check. The agent giving me a tour was actually a Marshal’s deputy on loan to the FBI. He works on the domestic terrorism task force. His job is mainly tracking down internet threats on politicians, federal judges, and attorneys. He says that most threats are just people agitated at the world, and they’re not dangerous whatsoever. Also apparently the most threats are towards the Secretary of Education. Every threat has to be investigated. He also investigates bomb/shooting threats towards schools. He says since the recent attack in Florida, there have been an overwhelming amount of copycat threats. The best part of his job is that he goes to all the Cleveland sports games he wants free of charge. He gets free seats right next to the Cavs bench. The FBI goes to all “major events” in Cleveland, even though nothing of federal interest ever happens at the events. He also told me some stories about when the Republican National Convention was in town a few years ago. Apparently leftist protesters had left backpacks full of rocks throughout the convention, just in case there was a riot. The FBI found and disposed of all of the rocks.

The Secret Service

                Today did not start off well, I had my AP Calculus exam. When I got to the Marshal’s office in the afternoon, Susan pitied me because she also doesn’t like math. So I didn’t have to do any paper work today. On the other hand, I did get to visit the Secret Service office. What stuck out to me most about the Secret Service office was the numerous hanged pictures of Presidents. Honestly I saw countless pictures of both Bushes, Reagan, and Trump. (I wonder where they land on the political compass hmm…) But regardless of political views everyone who worked there was very welcoming and nice. (I really want to abbreviate Secret Service to SS for convenience but I know that would be inappropriate.) 

The top is counterfeit~ You can tell because the seal is blurry

So for those readers who are unaware, the Secret Service has two jobs: security and investigation. Security, which most people know the Secret Service handles, means protecting the President, Vice President, and their families. The investigation side, this is largely unknown, is capturing financial criminals. The financial crimes the Secret Service investigates are usually either money laundering or counterfeit currency. A few of the agents showed me some counterfeit bills. Most counterfeit currency is made by bleaching dollar bills and reprinting lager amounts on them. There are currency pens, which most stores and banks have, that will react to any bleach stains left on the bills. Surprisingly, the Secret Service office receives over a million dollars a year in counterfeit, just from northeast Ohio. The agents said there is an abundance of fake money here because of the abundance of heroin addicts who use fake currency to fund their addictions.

A picture of Reagan that

can be found in a few Secret Service offices

Also at the Secret Service office I met an agent working on a phone tap of a suspected money launderer. They sat around five computer screens constantly waiting for there to be a phone call. The phone had to be monitored 24/7, even though there were only around six calls a week. I also viewed their technology lab. In the lab, forensic investigators went through suspects’ cell phones and computers. They told me the hardest part of their jobs is unlocking IPhones.

Don't Talk to People on the Internet

The Courthouse

This morning started off like usual: paperwork. No more fictional license plates though, this time it was packaging and mailing case files to the US Attorney General. After all the envelopes were sealed, I had a conversation with one of the Marshal’s Deputies. This deputy’s job was working on finding fugitives and missing persons. He told me about a missing minor case he solved last weekend. I would like to go into more detail on this but I signed a confidentiality agreement, so it would be a federal crime if I disclosed details about the case. But long story short, a seventeen year-old (my age) was taken from his home by a man he met on the internet, and found a week later in the man’s basement “sex dungeon”. Moral of the story: don’t talk to people on the internet.

                After that story, the deputy told me about the non-confidential fugitive case he’s working on. In 1965, a man named Lester Eubanks confessed and was convicted of sexual assaulting a fourteen year-old girl and murdering her using blunt force trauma (a brick). Eubanks was given the death penalty, but later a government sanction turned his death sentence into life imprisonment. Eubanks was taken off of death row, and put into the general prison population. Since he was a friendly man, he was given a day of furlough to Christmas shop for his family. The police dropped him off at a mall and he hasn’t been seen by authorities since. That was in 1973.

Current sketch of Eubanks: Call USMS with any

information

                Once I finished that totally depressing and pretty disturbing conversation with the deputy, I went to watch a sentencing. The man being sentenced was fifty years-old and police had found over one hundred and fifty images of child pornography on his computer. To make matters worse, he hadn’t found these pictures on google; he solicited them from minors. This case was in federal court since the man was a citizen of Canada, making the crime international and therefor federal. In the back of the courtroom, I was sitting behind one of the victim’s parents and grandparents. The victim’s mother stood and gave a statement about what the man had done to her daughter; she could barely speak she was crying so much. Then the criminal stood up and apologized to the family; he was also crying. When he was apologizing, the grandmother of the victim whispered, “this is bull****.” Then the criminal turned to the judge and said he didn’t understand how American child pornography laws worked and that he wasn’t a criminal. The judge just shook his head. The man ended up only receiving the mandatory minimum: fifteen years. The prosecution attempted to object to this, saying the man was a cultivated criminal and deserved twenty. The judge ignored this. When the criminal was handcuffed by the Court Marshal and taken to the cage elevator, he started screaming and crying.

                It was a heavy day to say the least but at least these men are being punished for their crimes.

Felonious Assault and Drug Smuggling

 What a day! Friday morning, when I was taking the elevator up to the Marshal’s office on floor 12, the US Attorney got in my elevator! He remembered me and we had a nice chat. At the office I finished up my fake license plates requests from Thursday. Then I decided to take a break and watch some sentencing hearings in court.

The most interesting sentencing hearing was for a twenty-five year old man. He was out on three years parole, after being imprisoned for a sex crime. He violated his parole three different ways. The first two ways were by not signing up for GED classes or attending Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, both of which had been court mandated that he do. In his defense he said he couldn’t afford GED classes and only missed CBT because it interfered with his work schedule. The third way he violated his parole was a little more ~serious~ of a violation.

The Ohio HIDTA Badge

One day, he was walking and he attempted to rob a 67 year-old man. The older man pulled out a knife and told him to get lost. A few days later he saw the old man at a corner store. Angered because of what had happened the other day he struck the elderly man with a beer bottle. The man had to get six stiches in his face.

When the judge asked him about the beer bottle incident (that the elderly man had reported to the police), the twenty-five year old said he didn’t use a beer bottle and gave the man six stiches with his fist. The judge was not interested in this story and said it seemed very unlikely that you could hit someone hard enough in the face to induce that amount of stiches. The judge also said regardless of weapon, a young man shouldn’t attack an older person, and that even without the bottle the crime would be considered felonious assault. He was sentenced to two more years in prison.

A Map of the biggest HIDTA agencies

After the sentencing, Susan (my mentor) took my on a field trip to the local HIDTA office. HIDTA, High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, is a federally funded program, existing (in every state) since the War on Drugs began. The office had crime analysts from all different bureaus: FBI, DEA, Marshal, Military, state police, and local police. What this team of people do is use their specialized skills to investigate international drug smuggling mainly via satellite maps and phone records. The Major who ran HIDTA talked to me saying that if I had interest in working for the federal government it was important to get as many various degrees as I could. This was so I can differentiate myself from the rest of the “bucket of individuals” applying for the same jobs as me.

Big Pharm and the US Attorney's Office

Some dead criminal files

                There was a protest outside the courthouse today! I had to walk through it in order to get inside. Hundreds of people were outside with signs and chants protesting Big Pharm. They wanted an opioid manufacturing company to pay the public billions instead of the millions they were already paying. I felt kind of weird walking past the protest in my business clothes and into the building. There were two deputies outside with guns watching the protesters who smiled and said good morning to me as I walked in. I have participated in a lot of protests but now I am on the other side. The good news is, the security guards somehow learned that I was working for the Marshal and now I no longer have to go through security.

Justin Herdman

                For my work today I filed more fictional license reports (see last blog post). After I finished that I got a more exciting assignment. The Marshal’s office has hundreds of files on individual criminals, and occasionally a criminal dies. My job was to take around 75 files of dead criminals and “clean them out”. This meant removing all personal information and shredding it. It also meant I read about 75 interesting criminals’ lives. Most of the criminals were either murderers or rapists or drug smugglers. (Or all three). After destroying all of the files, Susan set up a meeting with me and the US Attorney, Justin Herdman. She knows I want to be a prosecutor and thought this would be a good experience for me. I am so thankful she did. Mr. Herdman and I sat and chatted about law school, and when he was a prosecutor in NYC. Two of his cases got turned into Law & Order episodes. He also explained to me how to become a prosecutor and US Attorney, and said I could contact him if I ever needed career assistance.

Fake License Plates and Theiving Mailmen

I want to start this blog post by thanking everyone who pays their federal taxes. It is because of you responsible citizens the Marshal’s office (USMS) was able to buy me a parking spot for $100 this month. My spot is number twenty-three (which is a good omen in Cleveland).

Fictional License Files & my view of the Lake

                On the first day of my internship, after finding my parking spot, I entered the daunting Carl B. Stokes U.S. Courthouse. I had to go through security, similar to TSA at the airport. Apparently I look non-threatening because they didn’t care about the weapon on my key chain. (It’s only there for self-defense purposes). Finding the USMS office was easy since it takes up the entirety of the twelfth floor. When I arrived, I was buzzed in, and my mentor, Susan, had not yet arrived. Luckily two of the college interns and a Marshal’s deputy took me on a tour. They showed me the office, which looks stereotypical with a few large offices, a conference room, and some cubicles. Then they showed me the processing room, where newly captured federal criminals are questioned, fingerprinted, and swabbed for DNA. Next to the processing room are two cells for holding prisoners short term, before they are arraigned.  Then they took me to the prisoners’ elevator, which has a cage for the prisoners. We went up to one of the empty federal court rooms. The deputy told me that the processing/arraignment was designed to confuse prisoners because there were no windows whatsoever. The deputy and interns also told my interesting stories about prisoners biting federal officers and having grills (for the mouth not backyard) worth over $14,000.

Courtroom 15B

                After my tour, Susan had arrived and she gave me my first assignment: filing requests for “fictional license plates”. A fictional license plate is a license plate for an undercover cop registered with the undercover fake name. I had to file requests for these from the state since the state controls license plates. Susan, who is very nice and relaxed, told me there was an interesting sentencing for larceny (thievery) in courtroom 15B. I took a break from my filing to watch the sentencing. It was interesting! The convicted man was 44 years-old, married with four children, and had no past criminal record. He was a USPS mail deliverer and in August he stole a parcel from the post office that contained 6.7 lbs. of marijuana. He was caught on the video cameras. Since the USPS is a federal institution, stealing from it is a federal crime. The judge sentenced him to three months in prison and five years parole. After the sentencing the judge told me that sentencing was the one thing that never became easier, and nor should it.

Introduction

The US Marshal's office is on the twelfth floor of the far right building

Since a very young age I have been interested in criminal justice. I was the ten year-old girl who spent her free time reading Ann Rule (a true crime novelist) and watching Forensic Files. Last December, in my intensive In Pursuit of Justice, my class and I took a field trip to the US Marshal’s Office in downtown Cleveland. We met with the Marshal, Mr. Peter Elliot. He told our class stories of his career as US Marshal: creating a program that has apprehended tens of thousands of fugitives, busting inner-state drug cartels, and interrogating serial killers. When Mr. Elliot was giving us a tour of his office, he showed us were the interns worked. The interns (usually college students), worked with the “Cold Case Squad”. This squad is a division created by Mr. Elliot dedicated to finding fugitives who escaped prison in the 1970’s and 1980’s. The interns created webs like the ones in movies: pictures of people and places connected with strings and labeled with dates.

Mr. Peter Elliot

I talked to one of the college interns who was tracking down an individual from the 1980’s, who could possibly have been a number of wanted persons, including the Zodiac Killer. She was doing research using the Ancestry database, finding blood relatives of the suspicious individual. I, being my nerdy and interested in crime self, thought this was the coolest thing ever. When I returned home from the field trip I emailed the Marshal’s office asking if I could intern with them for my senior project. Surprisingly, perhaps because of the Hawken name, they agreed, no questions asked. I start my internship tomorrow, and am very excited. My briefcase and parking pass are ready to go! I won’t know exactly what I am doing until I arrive at the office at nine tomorrow morning, but I will be doing some kind of criminal research, and answering my essential questions: What do the US Federal Marshal and his deputies do to solve crimes and apprehend criminals?