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).