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.