The lighter side of Florida crime!
First up:
Nude dude on beach fleeing deputies left ID, cellphone, shorts behind
Deputies arrived in a marked four-wheel-drive patrol vechicle to respond to a report of nudity on a public St. Augustine beach Thursday morning. Once there, they saw a naked man walking along the water’s edge ….
Okay, I’ve actually done that, once, long ago, when I was still young and at least arguably worth seeing nude. Several of us were talking about going skinny dipping, but no one else had the nerve. Actually it was great, as the water temps were very warm and the surf was light. Also? Didn’t get stung by jelly fish!
… in view of several beachgoers, according to an arrest affidavit from the St. John Sheriff’s Office.
Um, but I didn’t do that. It was the middle of the night (like 3 AM or thereabouts) and the only witnesses were the people I was with. Plus, I was auditioning, as it were, for two women I was interested in. I eventually ended up involved with one of them, and probably just mis-timed things with the other. Oh well, the follies of youth!
But back to our intrepid naked man. It turns out that alcohol was probably involved! I know, who would have guessed?
Also, witnesses told police that a SECOND naked man had been walking around the area. They eventually found the shorts, phones and IDs of the people involved. Nothing like getting plastered in the middle of the day and walking around naked at the beach. Other than getting arrested, the second most likely bad outcome would be some NASTY sunburn!
And that takes us to story number two:
Man running from deputies attacked by alligator
You would think the headline says it all, but not quite!
A Florida man fleeing a traffic stop was attacked by an alligator Thursday, according to the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office.
Deputies attempted to pull Bryan Zuniga, 20, over for not driving in a single lane around 2:47 a.m. near the 7100 block of 78th Avenue North. Zuniga stopped the vehicle, jumped out of the passenger side and broke through a fence, deputies said.
He reached a water treatment plant between Westchester Boulevard and 71st Street North, which is where he said the alligator attacked him.
Deputies found Zuniga at a nearby hospital where he was being treated for multiple puncture wounds to his face, arm and armpit area.
He was arrested around 12 p.m., taken to the Pinellas County Jail and charged with breaking or injuring fences, fleeing and eluding a police officer, driving while licenses suspended and resisting an officer without violence, reports show.
He’s being charged with ‘breaking or injuring fences’! This guy isn’t exactly Keyser Söze.
The Down-side of Modern Criminal Forensics
Modern DNA detection is a great boon for people trying to solve certain crimes. But there is a real down-side risk involved as well: criminals working harder to destroy evidence.
Warning, what follows is disturbing, so I’ll put it ‘below the fold’ for the squeamish.
Reading Comprehension FAIL
This morning I saw a story that caught my eye on Yahoo! News. The headline read:
Insight: Florida man sees “cruel” face of U.S. justice
So I clicked on the story to read it later. I just finished reading the story and doing a little research on it.
The story is about some low-life named Quartavious Davis from South Florida. Mr. Davis is upset because he was sentenced to almost 162 years in prison for his first offence. However, his outrage and shock is a bit misplaced, as his first conviction actually covers seven armed robberies, during two of which he allegedly fired his weapon. This string of armed robberies was committed with several accomplices (making him a gang-banger, and a lousy one at that) shortly after he turned 18. I guess the $674 a month he was getting from Social Security Disability Insurance wasn’t enough. (Yes, this guy is a poster-child for the anti-welfare crowd.)
Mr. Davis got this massive sentence because (a) all his co-defendants took plea deals and rolled on him and (b) the federal government has a policy known as “stacking” in which the sentences get stacked on top of each other.
So obviously, this is a problem with Florida’s horrible, archaic justice system, right?
Well, no. I’m willing to bet that this crowd (do we count as a crowd?) noticed that I mentioned the federal government. Yes, Mr. Davis somehow managed to get his dumb-assed self prosecuted in a federal court, by a federal prosecutor (funny how that works), before a federal judge, and has been sentenced to rot to death in a federal prison under federal sentencing guidelines.
However, the article in question (from Reuters) makes this into a state issue about Florida. The commenters there and elsewhere barely noticed.
So this is all about the backwards state of Florida and how racist and evil conservatives are for a great many people in the echo-chamber.
Whatever. The people making the complaints about the awfulness of Florida are incapable of reading. Not to mention that the goon reporter from Reuters is intentionally misleading them. (You can read the story yourselves and figure out how.)
But here’s a nice little factoid from the Reuters article:
Since 2003, the Justice Department has had guidelines in place that discourage prosecutors from stacking in cases where it can lead to excessive sentences.
Yet prosecutors have broad discretion within their jurisdictions to follow their own lights, according to criminal-law experts.
So the Bush Justice Department actually discouraged the practice, though (in typical fashion) they didn’t actually do anything to end the practice of governmental over-reach.
So who is behind this sentence? Besides the Congress and Justice Department, the man most responsible appears to be Wifredo A. “Willy” Ferrer, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida. Who just happens to be an Obama appointee.
So, clearly a Hispanic-American federal prosecutor reporting to a black US AG and appointed by a black President working under federal guidelines is a sign of racist Florida being a backwater of justice.
ADDED: I should add that Quartavious Davis’s parents should probably spend time in prison for their choice of name for their son. This isn’t a new position for me.
Ambiance 