Interesting title, useless content. Video seems to be just a collection of document screenshots. Faking search warrants is a serious issue, but the compiler of this collection would have a lot more impact by adding a few hundred words to explain the point of the site instead of leaving it as a puzzle for the reader.
Is this an attack on bad prosecutors in general? Is the website author the victim of prosecutorial harassment? I can't easily tell, and after 5 minutes lost interest in trying to figure it out.
There are actually that many words as subtitles in the video, I didn't leave out the hearing impaired.
And a few hundred words are not necessary when six words at the top of the screen pretty much make it clear to most people. Maybe <h1> is not big enough, will consider making it bigger.
I realise you are being sarcastic but I genuinely did not see the H1. The face on the video was probably the first thing I looked at and then I went scanning for some explanatory text. It's your choice what you do with your web page but a short paragraph would, imho, help to engage casual visitors.
The point of the words isn't in service of the hearing impaired it's to convince the person of the worthiness of a cause or at least to keep an open mind while watching a 16 minute youtube video. The meat of many matters can be digested in about 10 seconds and the whole meal disposed of in 5-10 minutes given that adults easily read at 300 words per minute.
Most "causes" on youtube are to be quite frank absolute garbage and take 15-30 minutes to cover issues that could profitably have been read in 2 minutes of actual content in between ads and words from your sponsor. You had about 10 seconds to convince people that they wouldn't be wasting their time watching the video and you entirely failed.
Based on reading others analysis it could have been summarized as convicted conman who is almost certainly guilty alleges unproven proprietorial misconduct to distract from own guilt and invites rubes to get in on the con on the ground floor.
I believe that misconduct happens even happens frequently and have an interest in stopping it but I don't believe the most effective vehicle for that change would be donating money to a conman. I would prefer causes like the ACLU and the innocence project while leaving this party to handle his own affairs. I trust that his extreme vested interest in dealing with this matter will inspire him to pursue it to its end without outside investment.
Your video didn't have subtitles. I get what it's about, but I don't want to sit through your video or spend lots of time trying to figure it out from documents without any other context. Watching videos is extremely time consuming compared to reading, and since I'm going to have to read the source documents anyway to fully understand your argument., I really don't want to process two different kinds of media.
It could be that you're making a really great point, but it could also be that you're a crank or a bullshit artist. If you want me to invest time caring about your issue, invest a little of your own in explaining it.
>A former Texas district attorney agreed Friday to serve 10 days in jail for withholding evidence that could have stopped an innocent man from going to prison for nearly 25 years — apparently the first time a prosecutor has been sent to jail for concealing evidence helpful to the defense.
I would say if this actually the case and the prosecutor was forging documents the following is true.
1. This isn't his/her first time.
2. It wasn't their original idea and there is a history of this behavior in this area that needs investigated.
>> A former Texas district attorney agreed Friday to serve 10 days in jail for withholding evidence that could have stopped an innocent man from going to prison for nearly 25 years
10 days is nothing. Why not give the prosecutor 25 years in prison? After all, that is how many years the innocent man was sent to prison for.
Standard 3-1.2 Functions and Duties of the Prosecutor
>(b) The primary duty of the prosecutor is to seek justice within the bounds of the law, not merely to convict. The prosecutor serves the public interest and should act with integrity and balanced judgment to increase public safety both by pursuing appropriate criminal charges of appropriate severity, and by exercising discretion to not pursue criminal charges in appropriate circumstances. The prosecutor should seek to protect the innocent and convict the guilty, consider the interests of victims and witnesses, and respect the constitutional and legal rights of all persons, including suspects and defendants.
I get that everyone laughs at normative standards nowadays, and the concept of 'civic duty' is apparently dying out, but there's your standard right there. If you're forging warrants, you are abdicating the responsibilities of your station.
> If you're forging warrants, you are abdicating the responsibilities of your station.
Those are strong words, and I fully agree with them.
Prosecutors enjoy a nearly unqualified immunity, so long as they are doing their job they cannot be sued in civil court. However, forging documents is abjectly NOT part of a prosecutors jobs, mainly because it's illegal, but also highly immoral and unethical irrespective of law... in violation of Federal rules of procedure.
So one prosecutor acted unethically one time, and that is your evidence that "looking [at] prosecutors to be moral people is [a] mistake"?
Come on. First, that's literally one person out of thousands. Second, your example is a single state court prosecutor. The U.S. Attorney's office has extremely high ethical standards.
I'm sure that in the days before cameras everywhere you'd be stating to the first instance of recorded police abuse "That's literally one cop out of thousands, second this is just one police department". But it turns out as more cameras have shown up, and as more people look we seem to find more and more cases. I guess the cameras cause cops to abuse people.
Did you watch the video? This is a convicted criminal nitpicking documents in his own case and then ranting about the judicial system. There is no real indication that any fraud or "scummy behavior" occurred here at all.
It's like asking you why you risk imminent death going out of the house and driving to work every day. People die on the roads, you know. It's just the risk factor that makes you not to think about it much (and just drive carefully). For a prosecutor (or police officer) this risk is even MUCH lower.
In case anyone else is confused, apparently this comes from a defendant in a wire fraud case, [name redacted], as per the gofundme page [0]
The case apparently found the couple guilty and charges were held against them, and I believe some jail time also [1] [2].
My post's purpose isn't to affirm or deny the claim in the video, but to add the context I was missing for when the video got to the end and changed its tone considerably.
I do think their observations are interesting, but I also assumed at first this was from an attorney showing instances of forged warrants, not from a layperson.
So while I do think there are interesting discrepancies, I would feel more comfortable taking them at face value if persons within the field of law would confirm some of these statements.
Thanks for the context. Was the GoFundMe campaign accessible when you linked it? I caught your comment at "3 minutes ago" and it can no longer be found.
Mr. Channon, is there anything you can say at this point about the allegations in the indictment? Are they whole-cloth fabrications, misreadings of the law, accurate, something else? Is there a victim here besides yourself?
There were three indictments in this case. The two lies the case was based on were:
•OfficeMax lost money every time I traded them a cartridge for $3 in net 45 store credit (pay no attention to the fact they refilled them, put them in generic packaging, and sold them for $10 less than a new $60 cartridge). They went off what they thought I paid as what they were actually worth (like having a pizza delivered, and telling them it's only worth $1.26 because that's all you believe they paid for the ingredients). Also pay no mind to the fact they could have stopped paying me at any time for them, for years, or asked me to stop bringing them in. But no, every time I came in with a bag, beep beep went the scanner 20 times, handed me a receipt confirming same with a smile, and out I went. Yet I was somehow the one stealing from them.
•I got explicit written permission from them with the receipt adjustments. They even reworded it to make it more explicitly permissible to do what I did. My public defender slow-walked this in front of the jury so I couldn't raise it as ineffective assistance.
If you watched the video, you'd know my wife was a victim. But the biggest victim I'd say is the American people. I've worked many years as a bay area mobile developer, and paid a lot in income taxes, and supported my family. Throwing a fine at me wouldn't have cost the tax base anything, but the hit to the taxpayer was substantial by taking away my ability to work and throwing my family onto public assistance. Most of America is disturbingly comfortable pinching pennies when it comes to aid to the poor but goes full drunken sailor when it comes to spending money on prisons.
The defendant defrauded Office Max's loyalty program to the tune of ~$180,000, although they managed to void $130k of rewards upon uncovering the scheme. They did so in a manner that could easily be traced back to them (e.g. signing up for 5400 Office Max accounts using the same 4 GMail addresses with randomly inserted periods to make slightly different user IDs). They accessed the email from the same IP address, put their actual personal home address for three of the 5400 accounts, and left several other pieces of breadcrumb evidence leading back to themselves.
This whole thing seems like a guilty person using accusations of prosecutorial misconduct to distract from their hopeless position in an FBI case.
Most of it is available in these two links. The justice.gov is the easiest and shortest but the justia.com has some information about their appeal and evidentiary challenges.
If you skip to page 12 and 13, you get a pretty good sense of the amateur nature of this fraud.
There is a preponderance of evidence against [name redacted]. He used the same emails from the fraudulent scheme to sign up for a Netflix account, pay for items shipped to his home address, and even used a personal PayPal account in conjunction with stolen rewards to make purchases. The FBI got data from eBay, Netflix, Google, and even Staples, to make a pretty airtight argument that this guy was the sole perpetuator behind the fraud.
Yeah even if they threw out anything associated with this supposedly bogus search warrant it really seems like there's plenty to convince a jury that he did in fact defraud OfficeMax.
> Yeah even if they threw out anything associated with this supposedly bogus search warrant it really seems like there's plenty to convince a jury that he did in fact defraud OfficeMax.
There is a legal doctrine called something like "fruit of the poisoned tree" which means any evidence and any subsequent evidence is tainted, and gets thrown out in court. So yeah, there is the potential he could appeal his case, and have a retrial where anything obtained from the FBI raid is thrown out. That could be huge for his case, or not.... (who knows)
The FBI swat team, while conducting their raid, supposedly extracted a confession under duress. There is a potential problem right there with Miranda rights, but also anything done under duress is potentially not admissible as evidence in criminal court.
When you say plenty of evidence against him, you are saying they had enough evidence in isolation of any evidence improperly gathered from his home & wife. Perhaps, or perhaps not enough to convince a jury.
Just the info from OfficeMax seems like enough in my opinion. He used 4 gmail addresses and reused some of them for his netflix and to get items delivered to his house. They could also find out where the gmail's were accessed from from google. All that combined would paint a pretty convincing picture to me, then it's just convincing the jury this rises to the level of fraud.
But also if you look at his actual appeals they don't challenge the evidence from the raid at all that I see it's all about the data from the OfficeMax rewards program that was produced by a 3rd party company; arguing they're not originals, aren't admissible because they're hear-say, etc. Maybe he just noticed this but this is even pretty weak evidence given there's not actually a standard form for any of the documents he pulls up.
As for the duress OP is a deeply involved narrator and there's no mention of this being before or after the Miranda warning.
You see, the judge ruled that enough time had elapsed that the conversation was consensual. My wife said it was almost instant from when they pointed guns and sexually assaulted her in the front yard, the FBI agent said no more than 10 minutes, the judge said it was at least 15 minutes.
So, consensual, while they're literally blocking any exit she has, won't let anyone in the house use the bathroom without them watching, she's still not wearing anything decent, and a squad is ransacking the house.
This case stinks to high heaven. What beggars belief, for me, is how everyone finds it so easy to doubt what I say and so easy to accept as gospel what the government says.
I am truly sorry for what you had to endure, it sounds completely uncalled for. After Bernie Madoff stole billions on Wall Street, the FBI came to his home and asked him "is there an innocent explanation for this?" before allowing him to get dressed and prepared for custody. If you were not showing any signs of resistance, there is no reason you or your wife should have been treated that way - if you have evidence of this, bring it up.
I would also concede that you may have a point with the warrant spacing, signature discrepancies, etc - at the very least, there is indication of a "guilty until proven innocent" mindset against you. However, you should also consider there is substantial hard evidence against you, provided by reputable third parties (Google, eBay, etc) - getting all of it declared inadmissible would be an uphill battle unless you have a highly motivated legal team.
Aside from obvious advice (don't do crime) I would say that the #1 most important thing to keep in mind if you are accused of a crime is to say nothing - no hello, no pleasantries, not even obvious answers - just "I would like a lawyer" and only speak when your lawyer is present. Innocent people have been convicted for not following this principle in dealing with the authorities.
Thanks for the decency, though I ask you: What signs of resistance could a half-naked woman offer a squad of SWATted-out FBI agents with assault rifles pointed at her head? No one claimed, in the hearing to follow, that there was any sign of resistance.
I suggest you read a little higher up in the threads ID 34241769 to see the nonsensical nature of the charges. It's a bit like:
We have proof you exited the bank, drove your own personal car without obscuring the license plate, and have video of you entering your own driveway. And you had $2000 in cash that came from the bank. Therefore, you are guilty of bank robbery. The evidence is overwhelming, we got it from cell phone records, Google street view and the outside bank security camera, the bank ledger says $2000 was removed from that drawer, as well as fingerprints and DNA tests of the bills we're going to seize as evidence. If you object, you're just a bank robber trying to escape punishment. Why should I believe you, bank robber? You see the missing pieces here?
Regarding your last paragraph, whoever first gave or followed that advice didn't consider being startled half-naked at gunpoint. Almost anyone who went through what my wife did would do the same as she did, except half would've wet themselves to boot. I know I would've. Ever had an M4 pointed at you?
It appears a number of dirty fed sockpuppets are on this board. Their staunchest defender has made 0 submissions and 6 comments in the entire life of the account, 5 of them on this thread. Can you spot it?
Again, completely agree with you that the situation you're describing should be rendered inadmissible as evidence given the severe duress you must have been under.
In regards to the printer cartridges (thread 34241769), I'd agree that objectively speaking you didn't really steal anything. You found an arbitrage opportunity and used it to the mutual benefit of yourself and the corporation buying the cartridges for $3 each to refill/resell.
In the case of the business rewards, that corporation created a customer rewards system, and you found an exploit in the system (i.e. using the store/receipt number along with a programmatic search for past transactions). I think if you had used this exploit casually, the FBI would not even bother pursuing it, and it probably wouldn't have been detected in the first place. There is some level of acceptance you need to have in the fact that you broke the terms of service by creating thousands of fake accounts, went to many stores in many different cities/states, adapted the exploit (when they added purchase amount verification) by noting purchase amounts of other customers in the store, resold the benefits on eBay, hired an accomplice in New Mexico, and so on.
On a personal level though, I'm sincerely rooting for you - the amounts in question are a rounding error to that size of corporation, and the "stolen funds" in question were anyways intended for customer rewards. I think your best outcome from a legal perspective is to admit what the evidence overwhelmingly seems to indicate, be radically honest with yourself about the situation, and resist the urge to be combative on technicalities - consider how it may lead to a worse overall outcome.
2. They aren't written by congress and should not be treated as such.
3. A corporation writes them for their own benefit.
4. A corporation changes them for their own benefit.
5. A corporation follows them, or doesn't, for their own benefit.
Any violation of corporate terms of service is, at best, a civil tort, not a criminal offense against these United States. Unless you're me, I suppose.
Further, these aren't terms of service I clicked "Agree" to, and in fact they evolved several times without my having read them, nor needed to have read them.
In retrospect, a steady series of frog boiling changes turned my conduct from allowed to questionable. I say questionable instead of illegal, or even forbidden, because I also had, upon every adjustment, explicit written permission from the company to adjust transactions I had not made. Maybe they didn't intend that with their word choices (they reworded it once without changing the meaning), but that just makes it sharp dealing, not fraud. That was absolutely sharp dealing (not a single other customer lost out on rewards, because of how their system was set up). Sharp dealing also happens to take place when an average consumer signs up for a rewards program, or a protection plan, or this week's sale when the actual price on a sale item is actually higher than last week's. I sharp dealt a sharp dealer. That much is true.
The accounts were actual accounts, predicated on fake information (this is not a minor distinction). The fake information was never read by any human, and fake not as a vehicle to defraud (since no human read them), but to avoid getting confused with other customers (it had been a problem), and to avoid getting junk mail. Is the person in line ahead of you at Kroger or Albertson's a fraudster for doing the same? Even if they have 5,000 rewards accounts? Assuming the worst motives in people might be the most comforting way to be, but it's not always the correct way to be.
Appreciate the legal advice (though I don't advise giving people legal advice), but I'd appreciate your considering how many people advise me to do what is easy (they think) instead of what is right. Ever considered signing something you knew wasn't true? That's what the plea offers were, not true. I had 20+ years staring at me on the other side of this false paper I was asked to sign and I don't think I could've signed it if my life depended on it. There's something deeper and more visceral to a signature than an idle scrawl. It's a door to your soul. Does that make me a more moral person than average? Perhaps not, but better than the treatment I've been getting.
Generally speaking, search warrants are pretty easy to get for prosecutors, and for good reason: If they required a ton of hard evidence to get, then a prosecutor wouldn't need it any more, they'd just charge the suspect. The entire reason for having search warrants is that there is "something" (a fact) which suggests you'll "probably" find evidence of a crime.
So because they are easy to get, why exactly would a prosecutor need to forge a warrant?
I'm no fan of the U.S. justice system, but the evidence in the affidavit included in the search warrant application undoubtedly gets the form signed in this case.
Did this FBI special agent risk the case, his career, and prior cases to take down a barely-six-figure crime scheme? Or did he open his network share and print "AO_106_Affidavit_for_Search_Warrant_7-87-scanned-OCR-dont-use.docx", last edited by Johnny the intern, instead of "AO106-latest.pdf"?
Exactly. The evidence in the video is utterly meaningless.
Here is what he has:
- The scan of the magistrate judge's pen looks like it is running out of ink.
- The form was copied and edited, and some of the edits use inconsistent fonts or have artifacts from being printed and scanned previously.
- The magistrate judge left off the year in one instance, and the time in another.
So what? Nothing about that says anything was forged. It's not unusual for attorneys and the Court to use messed up forms, because the forms aren't what matters. You could hand-write it on a napkin and it would be valid. Nor is it unusual for a hurried judge to be inconsistent in how they sign things.
This is an individual criminal defendant complaining about an alleged forgery of documents in their own case, and also arguing that the U.S. Attorney's Office was in a "corrupt alliance with OfficeMax," followed by a rant against the U.S. judicial system, prosecutors, and judges, and then a request for money and self-promotion of his merchandise and his book about another subject.
52 comments
[ 584 ms ] story [ 1172 ms ] threadIs this an attack on bad prosecutors in general? Is the website author the victim of prosecutorial harassment? I can't easily tell, and after 5 minutes lost interest in trying to figure it out.
There are actually that many words as subtitles in the video, I didn't leave out the hearing impaired.
And a few hundred words are not necessary when six words at the top of the screen pretty much make it clear to most people. Maybe <h1> is not big enough, will consider making it bigger.
The title makes clear the allegation. Not the evidence. Even allegation specifics, e.g. who forged whose signature on which form, is elusive.
Most "causes" on youtube are to be quite frank absolute garbage and take 15-30 minutes to cover issues that could profitably have been read in 2 minutes of actual content in between ads and words from your sponsor. You had about 10 seconds to convince people that they wouldn't be wasting their time watching the video and you entirely failed.
Based on reading others analysis it could have been summarized as convicted conman who is almost certainly guilty alleges unproven proprietorial misconduct to distract from own guilt and invites rubes to get in on the con on the ground floor.
I believe that misconduct happens even happens frequently and have an interest in stopping it but I don't believe the most effective vehicle for that change would be donating money to a conman. I would prefer causes like the ACLU and the innocence project while leaving this party to handle his own affairs. I trust that his extreme vested interest in dealing with this matter will inspire him to pursue it to its end without outside investment.
It could be that you're making a really great point, but it could also be that you're a crank or a bullshit artist. If you want me to invest time caring about your issue, invest a little of your own in explaining it.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ex-texas-prosecutor-fir...
>A former Texas district attorney agreed Friday to serve 10 days in jail for withholding evidence that could have stopped an innocent man from going to prison for nearly 25 years — apparently the first time a prosecutor has been sent to jail for concealing evidence helpful to the defense.
I would say if this actually the case and the prosecutor was forging documents the following is true.
1. This isn't his/her first time.
2. It wasn't their original idea and there is a history of this behavior in this area that needs investigated.
10 days is nothing. Why not give the prosecutor 25 years in prison? After all, that is how many years the innocent man was sent to prison for.
Standard 3-1.2 Functions and Duties of the Prosecutor
>(b) The primary duty of the prosecutor is to seek justice within the bounds of the law, not merely to convict. The prosecutor serves the public interest and should act with integrity and balanced judgment to increase public safety both by pursuing appropriate criminal charges of appropriate severity, and by exercising discretion to not pursue criminal charges in appropriate circumstances. The prosecutor should seek to protect the innocent and convict the guilty, consider the interests of victims and witnesses, and respect the constitutional and legal rights of all persons, including suspects and defendants.
I get that everyone laughs at normative standards nowadays, and the concept of 'civic duty' is apparently dying out, but there's your standard right there. If you're forging warrants, you are abdicating the responsibilities of your station.
In the meantime you'll get reelected again and again for being 'tough on crime'.
The incentives are misaligned for an optimal outcome.
Those are strong words, and I fully agree with them.
Prosecutors enjoy a nearly unqualified immunity, so long as they are doing their job they cannot be sued in civil court. However, forging documents is abjectly NOT part of a prosecutors jobs, mainly because it's illegal, but also highly immoral and unethical irrespective of law... in violation of Federal rules of procedure.
Come on. First, that's literally one person out of thousands. Second, your example is a single state court prosecutor. The U.S. Attorney's office has extremely high ethical standards.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna30210
But ya, scummy behavior.
Did you watch the video? This is a convicted criminal nitpicking documents in his own case and then ranting about the judicial system. There is no real indication that any fraud or "scummy behavior" occurred here at all.
The case apparently found the couple guilty and charges were held against them, and I believe some jail time also [1] [2].
My post's purpose isn't to affirm or deny the claim in the video, but to add the context I was missing for when the video got to the end and changed its tone considerably.
I do think their observations are interesting, but I also assumed at first this was from an attorney showing instances of forged warrants, not from a layperson.
So while I do think there are interesting discrepancies, I would feel more comfortable taking them at face value if persons within the field of law would confirm some of these statements.
0 - https://gofund.me/a58c25bd
1 - https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca10/1...
2 - [link redacted]
Edit: Fixed gofund.me link
Edit: Link was fixed!
And interesting, yes, the gofundme was live when I watched the video on the site (link is on the site).
I think it's just maybe how GoFundMe handle's the links?
https://gofund.me/a58c25bd
Works as normal I suppose for you.
Guess I'll have to make one minor change in iMovie and re-upload 2GB. I hope they don't pull this again.
•OfficeMax lost money every time I traded them a cartridge for $3 in net 45 store credit (pay no attention to the fact they refilled them, put them in generic packaging, and sold them for $10 less than a new $60 cartridge). They went off what they thought I paid as what they were actually worth (like having a pizza delivered, and telling them it's only worth $1.26 because that's all you believe they paid for the ingredients). Also pay no mind to the fact they could have stopped paying me at any time for them, for years, or asked me to stop bringing them in. But no, every time I came in with a bag, beep beep went the scanner 20 times, handed me a receipt confirming same with a smile, and out I went. Yet I was somehow the one stealing from them.
•I got explicit written permission from them with the receipt adjustments. They even reworded it to make it more explicitly permissible to do what I did. My public defender slow-walked this in front of the jury so I couldn't raise it as ineffective assistance.
If you watched the video, you'd know my wife was a victim. But the biggest victim I'd say is the American people. I've worked many years as a bay area mobile developer, and paid a lot in income taxes, and supported my family. Throwing a fine at me wouldn't have cost the tax base anything, but the hit to the taxpayer was substantial by taking away my ability to work and throwing my family onto public assistance. Most of America is disturbingly comfortable pinching pennies when it comes to aid to the poor but goes full drunken sailor when it comes to spending money on prisons.
This whole thing seems like a guilty person using accusations of prosecutorial misconduct to distract from their hopeless position in an FBI case.
1 - https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca10/1...
2 - https://www.justice.gov/usao-nm/pr/albuquerque-couple-senten...
If you skip to page 12 and 13, you get a pretty good sense of the amateur nature of this fraud.
There is a preponderance of evidence against [name redacted]. He used the same emails from the fraudulent scheme to sign up for a Netflix account, pay for items shipped to his home address, and even used a personal PayPal account in conjunction with stolen rewards to make purchases. The FBI got data from eBay, Netflix, Google, and even Staples, to make a pretty airtight argument that this guy was the sole perpetuator behind the fraud.
There is a legal doctrine called something like "fruit of the poisoned tree" which means any evidence and any subsequent evidence is tainted, and gets thrown out in court. So yeah, there is the potential he could appeal his case, and have a retrial where anything obtained from the FBI raid is thrown out. That could be huge for his case, or not.... (who knows)
The FBI swat team, while conducting their raid, supposedly extracted a confession under duress. There is a potential problem right there with Miranda rights, but also anything done under duress is potentially not admissible as evidence in criminal court.
When you say plenty of evidence against him, you are saying they had enough evidence in isolation of any evidence improperly gathered from his home & wife. Perhaps, or perhaps not enough to convince a jury.
But also if you look at his actual appeals they don't challenge the evidence from the raid at all that I see it's all about the data from the OfficeMax rewards program that was produced by a 3rd party company; arguing they're not originals, aren't admissible because they're hear-say, etc. Maybe he just noticed this but this is even pretty weak evidence given there's not actually a standard form for any of the documents he pulls up.
As for the duress OP is a deeply involved narrator and there's no mention of this being before or after the Miranda warning.
There was no Miranda warning.
You see, the judge ruled that enough time had elapsed that the conversation was consensual. My wife said it was almost instant from when they pointed guns and sexually assaulted her in the front yard, the FBI agent said no more than 10 minutes, the judge said it was at least 15 minutes.
So, consensual, while they're literally blocking any exit she has, won't let anyone in the house use the bathroom without them watching, she's still not wearing anything decent, and a squad is ransacking the house.
This case stinks to high heaven. What beggars belief, for me, is how everyone finds it so easy to doubt what I say and so easy to accept as gospel what the government says.
I would also concede that you may have a point with the warrant spacing, signature discrepancies, etc - at the very least, there is indication of a "guilty until proven innocent" mindset against you. However, you should also consider there is substantial hard evidence against you, provided by reputable third parties (Google, eBay, etc) - getting all of it declared inadmissible would be an uphill battle unless you have a highly motivated legal team.
Aside from obvious advice (don't do crime) I would say that the #1 most important thing to keep in mind if you are accused of a crime is to say nothing - no hello, no pleasantries, not even obvious answers - just "I would like a lawyer" and only speak when your lawyer is present. Innocent people have been convicted for not following this principle in dealing with the authorities.
I suggest you read a little higher up in the threads ID 34241769 to see the nonsensical nature of the charges. It's a bit like:
We have proof you exited the bank, drove your own personal car without obscuring the license plate, and have video of you entering your own driveway. And you had $2000 in cash that came from the bank. Therefore, you are guilty of bank robbery. The evidence is overwhelming, we got it from cell phone records, Google street view and the outside bank security camera, the bank ledger says $2000 was removed from that drawer, as well as fingerprints and DNA tests of the bills we're going to seize as evidence. If you object, you're just a bank robber trying to escape punishment. Why should I believe you, bank robber? You see the missing pieces here?
Regarding your last paragraph, whoever first gave or followed that advice didn't consider being startled half-naked at gunpoint. Almost anyone who went through what my wife did would do the same as she did, except half would've wet themselves to boot. I know I would've. Ever had an M4 pointed at you?
It appears a number of dirty fed sockpuppets are on this board. Their staunchest defender has made 0 submissions and 6 comments in the entire life of the account, 5 of them on this thread. Can you spot it?
In regards to the printer cartridges (thread 34241769), I'd agree that objectively speaking you didn't really steal anything. You found an arbitrage opportunity and used it to the mutual benefit of yourself and the corporation buying the cartridges for $3 each to refill/resell.
In the case of the business rewards, that corporation created a customer rewards system, and you found an exploit in the system (i.e. using the store/receipt number along with a programmatic search for past transactions). I think if you had used this exploit casually, the FBI would not even bother pursuing it, and it probably wouldn't have been detected in the first place. There is some level of acceptance you need to have in the fact that you broke the terms of service by creating thousands of fake accounts, went to many stores in many different cities/states, adapted the exploit (when they added purchase amount verification) by noting purchase amounts of other customers in the store, resold the benefits on eBay, hired an accomplice in New Mexico, and so on.
On a personal level though, I'm sincerely rooting for you - the amounts in question are a rounding error to that size of corporation, and the "stolen funds" in question were anyways intended for customer rewards. I think your best outcome from a legal perspective is to admit what the evidence overwhelmingly seems to indicate, be radically honest with yourself about the situation, and resist the urge to be combative on technicalities - consider how it may lead to a worse overall outcome.
"You're just making it worse for yourself!"
"Worse? How could it be worse?"
Terms of service are an interesting thing:
1. They have no force of law behind them.
2. They aren't written by congress and should not be treated as such.
3. A corporation writes them for their own benefit.
4. A corporation changes them for their own benefit.
5. A corporation follows them, or doesn't, for their own benefit.
Any violation of corporate terms of service is, at best, a civil tort, not a criminal offense against these United States. Unless you're me, I suppose.
Further, these aren't terms of service I clicked "Agree" to, and in fact they evolved several times without my having read them, nor needed to have read them.
In retrospect, a steady series of frog boiling changes turned my conduct from allowed to questionable. I say questionable instead of illegal, or even forbidden, because I also had, upon every adjustment, explicit written permission from the company to adjust transactions I had not made. Maybe they didn't intend that with their word choices (they reworded it once without changing the meaning), but that just makes it sharp dealing, not fraud. That was absolutely sharp dealing (not a single other customer lost out on rewards, because of how their system was set up). Sharp dealing also happens to take place when an average consumer signs up for a rewards program, or a protection plan, or this week's sale when the actual price on a sale item is actually higher than last week's. I sharp dealt a sharp dealer. That much is true.
The accounts were actual accounts, predicated on fake information (this is not a minor distinction). The fake information was never read by any human, and fake not as a vehicle to defraud (since no human read them), but to avoid getting confused with other customers (it had been a problem), and to avoid getting junk mail. Is the person in line ahead of you at Kroger or Albertson's a fraudster for doing the same? Even if they have 5,000 rewards accounts? Assuming the worst motives in people might be the most comforting way to be, but it's not always the correct way to be.
Appreciate the legal advice (though I don't advise giving people legal advice), but I'd appreciate your considering how many people advise me to do what is easy (they think) instead of what is right. Ever considered signing something you knew wasn't true? That's what the plea offers were, not true. I had 20+ years staring at me on the other side of this false paper I was asked to sign and I don't think I could've signed it if my life depended on it. There's something deeper and more visceral to a signature than an idle scrawl. It's a door to your soul. Does that make me a more moral person than average? Perhaps not, but better than the treatment I've been getting.
Generally speaking, search warrants are pretty easy to get for prosecutors, and for good reason: If they required a ton of hard evidence to get, then a prosecutor wouldn't need it any more, they'd just charge the suspect. The entire reason for having search warrants is that there is "something" (a fact) which suggests you'll "probably" find evidence of a crime.
So because they are easy to get, why exactly would a prosecutor need to forge a warrant?
Thus was born the "confidential informant" to get around that last little problem the 4th amendment held in their way
Did this FBI special agent risk the case, his career, and prior cases to take down a barely-six-figure crime scheme? Or did he open his network share and print "AO_106_Affidavit_for_Search_Warrant_7-87-scanned-OCR-dont-use.docx", last edited by Johnny the intern, instead of "AO106-latest.pdf"?
Here is what he has:
- The scan of the magistrate judge's pen looks like it is running out of ink.
- The form was copied and edited, and some of the edits use inconsistent fonts or have artifacts from being printed and scanned previously.
- The magistrate judge left off the year in one instance, and the time in another.
So what? Nothing about that says anything was forged. It's not unusual for attorneys and the Court to use messed up forms, because the forms aren't what matters. You could hand-write it on a napkin and it would be valid. Nor is it unusual for a hurried judge to be inconsistent in how they sign things.
Nothing here indicates a "forgery."
This is an individual criminal defendant complaining about an alleged forgery of documents in their own case, and also arguing that the U.S. Attorney's Office was in a "corrupt alliance with OfficeMax," followed by a rant against the U.S. judicial system, prosecutors, and judges, and then a request for money and self-promotion of his merchandise and his book about another subject.