This Week’s Corrupt Cops Stories

An Arkansas cop breaks bad, a North Carolina detective gets nailed for crooked busts, and more. Let’s get to it:

[image:1 align:left]In Raleigh, North Carolina, a former Raleigh police detective was arrested on July 29 for a string of wrongful drug arrests he made in 2019 and 2020. Then-Detective Omar Abdullah used an informant on controlled drug buys to arrest Black men on drug trafficking charges. But lab tests showed that the “drugs” the informant used in those transactions were not illegal narcotics and Abdullah failed to record the transactions on video. He was fired from the department in November 2021, and he is now charged with felony obstruction of justice.

In San Antonio, Texas, a former Bexar County jail deputy was arrested last Monday for smuggling drugs to a jail inmate. Mario Sepulveda, 21, went down after the sheriff’s office was tipped that he was sneaking meth and synthetic marijuana to an inmate. Authorities then listened to a recorded phone conversation between the inmate and a woman on the outside that revealed the woman would give drugs to Sepulveda and he would be paid through an online app. He is charged with abuse of official capacity between $1,500 and $20,000, a state jail felony, and possession of a controlled substance in a correctional facility, a third-degree felony.

In Fort Lauderdale, Florida, a Broward County jail deputy was arrested last Wednesday for allegedly smuggling drugs into the jail. Deputy Victoria Campos-Marquetti, 21, came to authorities’ attention over a relationship with an inmate, and that led to her arrest. She is charged with possessing oxycodone with intent to deliver, unlawful compensation, and committing a second-degree felony while armed.

In Gatesville, Texas, a state prison guard was arrested last Wednesday after being caught with cell phones, various illicit drugs, and other contraband that was destined for the prison. Guard Mederis Shaw, 33, faces being fired from his job and possibly felony charges once the prison system finishes its investigation and refers to the case to its Special Prosecution Unit.

In Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a state prison guard was arrested Monday for allegedly selling drugs to a prisoner. Guard Natalie Greene, 24, went down after authorities got word of drug sales and set up a deal where undercover investigators posed as drug distributors to meet with her. She accepted $1,000 in cash and a package of fake drugs and was then arrested. She is charged with contraband and drug dealing offenses.

In Fayetteville, Arkansas, a former Lowell police officer was sentenced August 18 to more than 12 years in federal prison for slinging meth. Skylar Houston went down after his name came up as the Fourth Judicial District Drug Task Force was investigating a drug trafficking operation. Detectives then conducted two separate controlled meth buys from Houston and then arrested him in April 2021. During a search of his residence, they found over 7 pounds of methamphetamine, approximately 4 pounds of marijuana, 1,485 Xanax pills, LSD, mushrooms and steroids.  Two additional firearms were also seized during execution of the warrant.  The drugs were locked in a safe for future distribution by the organization.  

via Criminal Justice https://ift.tt/QizHpAa

August 31, 2022 at 05:40PM

How Ad Tech Became Cop Spy Tech

This article is part of EFF’s investigation of location data brokers and Fog Data Science. Be sure to check out our issue page on Location Data Brokers.

If a company wants to advertise something to you on the internet, it first has to know who you are and what you like to buy. There are many different approaches to gathering this data, but all generally have one goal in common: they link you with the data generated by your devices.

If law enforcement wants to track you via data generated by your devices, it first has to know where to find that data and how it links to you. As it turns out, these goals align quite strongly with the advertisers.

You can probably guess where this is going.

A multi-billion dollar industry of advertising data brokers sells sensitive data gathered from people’s phones to a wide range of clientele, including the U.S. military, federal law enforcement agencies and, as EFF has learned, state and local law enforcement. This is especially problematic because many law enforcement agencies have argued, erroneously, that they don’t need a warrant to buy people’s location data from data brokers.

And there’s one key digital advertising technology that Fog and other data brokers have turned into a police surveillance technology: the ad ID. Although Android and iOS call it different things, an advertiser identifier (ad ID for short) is a random string of letters and numbers generated for your device and attached to bundles of data generated by the apps and websites you use. These bundles of data often include private information about you, such as your year of birth, gender, what search terms you use, and perhaps most importantly for law enforcement, your location. When your device sends this data along, it’s often bought by data brokers to be repackaged and resold.

Since each of these bundles of data has your unique ad ID attached to it, data brokers can later group them together to form a more complete picture of your behavior. Without an ad ID, the data brokers and their law enforcement customers would have a much harder time tracking individuals in the sea of datapoints.

Because ad IDs are randomly generated, data brokers like Fog Data Science like to claim that the data they sell doesn’t contain personally identifiable information (PII). This, as multiple studies have shown, is bogus. Ad IDs, because they allow disparate data points to be grouped into an individual’s pattern of movement, can make it trivially easy to identify where a person sleeps at night, goes to work during the day, which bars they frequent, and much more. It takes just a few location hits to identify a person. Police know this. For example, in documents obtained by EFF, a police officer in St. Louis wrote regarding Fog: “There is no PI [personal information] linked to the [device ID]. (But, if we are good at what we do, we should be able to figure out the owner).”

Ad IDs are a crucial part of the online advertising ecosystem. Without them (or a similar technique for fingerprinting devices), it’s hard to imagine the data brokers’ current business model continuing to function. Certainly, companies like Fog and Venntel would find it much harder to sell individual device’s location data to law enforcement, which would be a huge win for people’s privacy.

A world without ad IDs isn’t hard to imagine, either. Starting in iOS 10.0, Apple began providing an option to “zero out” a device’s ad ID, and recently this option was enabled by default for all iOS users. Analytics data suggests that in the wake of iOS 14.5, 96% of U.S. users opt-out of tracking, effectively disabling ad IDs for iOS altogether. Google’s Android also has an option to remove your ad ID, but it’s still not enabled by default. Until all phone manufacturers disable this pernicious feature for good, there are some easy steps you can take to disable your ad ID.

Additionally, we need new laws that limit how corporations process our data, and how police acquire that data from businesses.

Read more about Fog Data Science:

via EFF.org Updates https://ift.tt/PBtx6h8

September 1, 2022 at 01:18AM

Wife of Clarence Thomas Appealed to Wisconsin Reps to Reverse 2020 Election

Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, tried to persuade Wisconsin legislators to reverse the state’s electoral count in the November 2020 elections as part of her efforts to prevent then-President Donald Trump from losing power, reports CNBC.com. In an email to Wisconsin representatives, Thomas pleaded with them to “do their constitutional duty.”  Shr sent a nearly identical email to legislators in Arizona. Joe Biden won the popular vote in both states and sent Biden electors to the Electoral College. Thomas, who has been a forceful ally with some of Trump’s most hard-right supporters, insists she keeps her activities are separate from her husband’s status.

via The Crime Report https://ift.tt/eT9ZzqJ

September 2, 2022 at 10:29AM

She Lost Her Baby, Then Her Freedom

Two months after she had a stillbirth, officers arrested Brooke Shoemaker at her parent’s home in east Alabama, weeks before her 37th birthday. Police contended drug use caused the loss of her baby. She suddenly found herself facing decades in prison for the unusual charge of “chemical endangerment causing death,” a law unique to Alabama.

Shoemaker thought she could beat the charge, she said, because many medical experts say that drug use does not cause stillbirths. Toxicology tests found methamphetamine in the fetus’ blood, but the medical examiner could not say whether the drug led to its death.

“Certainly, people have stillborn infants,” State Medical Examiner Dr. Stephen Boudreau testified at Shoemaker’s 2020 trial. “We have spontaneous abortions. Did a certain drug cause that? It can. I mean, that’s as far as I can get with it. It certainly can. But it’s – that’s why my report says undetermined.”

But a jury in Auburn found Shoemaker guilty. She is now serving 18 years in one of the nation’s most overcrowded prison systems.

Shoemaker is among at least 20 women in Alabama since 2006 who suffered miscarriage or stillbirth — then faced the harshest possible criminal charges, with consequences as severe as those for murder, rape or kidnapping.

Alabama has long led the nation in arrests of women who use drugs during pregnancy, although reporting by The Marshall Project, The Frontier and AL.com finds similar approaches spreading to other states, including Oklahoma and South Carolina.

In Alabama, prosecutors rely on a law passed to protect children from the dangers of home meth labs. In 2013, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that those meth-lab protections also apply to fetuses, who qualify as people under the emerging “personhood” theory championed by anti-abortion activists. That decision opened the floodgates for hundreds of cases in Alabama, most of which involved women arrested for drug use who gave birth to healthy babies.

The stakes are much higher for the unlucky few who suffered pregnancy loss. Women who use drugs during pregnancy and deliver healthy babies face up to 10 years in prison, but those who miscarry or have a stillbirth can be sentenced to 99 years. Shoemaker received one of the longest prison sentences of any of the women AL.com identified in Alabama who were charged with causing the deaths of their fetuses.

Shoemaker, a college graduate and mother of four, said she now regrets not taking the stand at her trial.

“Miscarriages happen every day — it’s the natural process,” Shoemaker said. “Basically, the jury, by convicting me of this charge, said there is no reason other than meth use that I had that child early.”

Shoemaker had long struggled with methamphetamine addiction. She started experimenting with the drug in college at Auburn University.

In October 2015, Shoemaker had her first run-in with the police, who arrested her on drug possession charges. She pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors, possession of marijuana and paraphernalia, and received a 12-month suspended sentence.

In 2016, she became pregnant with her fourth child. She signed up for Medicaid and got an ultrasound at a storefront that offered 3-D images. When she tried to make an appointment with the doctor who delivered her third child, she said, a member of the staff told her she owed $700 and turned her away.

She said she always planned to keep the baby.

“I believe in the sanctity of life,” she said. “It wasn’t going to be easy, but I knew we would find a way to take care of another child.”

On March 8, 2017, Shoemaker had used meth while out with a friend, she said. She felt something wet running down her leg and eventually realized it was amniotic fluid. Her water was leaking months earlier than expected.

“I know it sounds uneducated, but I started looking up clear, odorless fluid on the internet,” she said. “And there was nothing on there that said to go to the hospital immediately.”

The next day, while taking a bath to ease her symptoms, she began to deliver the baby. The boy, who weighed a bit more than two pounds according to the autopsy report, was stillborn. Shoemaker admitted her meth use to doctors at the hospital, agreed to have her blood drawn, and spoke to a detective who appeared at her bedside.

The pathologist found a tear to the fetus’ liver — probably caused by paramedics’ attempts to resuscitate it — and a small hemorrhage on the placenta, all documented in the autopsy report. Otherwise, the baby was healthy but premature, probably between 24 and 26 weeks’ gestation. According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, that would classify him as extremely preterm – and at high risk of death or disability.

The pathologist ruled the manner and cause of death “undetermined,” but noted the presence of drugs in the autopsy report.

The coroner, an elected official with no medical training, listed chemical endangerment and methamphetamine toxicity as the baby’s cause of death on the death certificate. Later he would say he arrived at that conclusion after speaking to a pathologist unconnected to the case who never examined the body. The coroner died in June.

In other parts of the country, similar cases have received great scrutiny. Earlier this year, a judge in California vacated the conviction of a woman who suffered a stillbirth allegedly caused by drug use. Another woman from the same county had her case dismissed.

Hundreds of people have signed a petition to overturn the conviction of Brittany Poolaw of Oklahoma, who miscarried after using meth. Editorials and articles about her case have appeared in the New York Times, BBC and CBS News.

Yet the Shoemaker case — and her sentence — barely made waves in Alabama, where criminal cases against pregnant women are not uncommon. Chemical endangerment was the fourth-leading cause of incarceration for women in 2019, beating out credit card fraud and drug dealing, according to the Alabama Sentencing Commission.

Despite that, medical experts still can’t say with certainty how drug use affects developing fetuses. Dire warnings about crack babies in the 1980s proved to be unfounded, later research showed.

That uncertainty extends to stillbirth, said Dr. Gregory G. Davis, chief coroner and medical examiner for Jefferson County, the state’s most populous county, which includes Birmingham.

“Certain drugs can make that more likely, particularly the stimulants cocaine and methamphetamine,” Davis said. “They could possibly play a role in that, but as I said, it’s really complicated. Smoking cigarettes can do the same sort of thing. So how to tease all of that apart is very difficult.”

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Others say it’s important to hold women accountable for drug use during pregnancy if there’s a chance it could harm babies. Chris Connolly, district attorney for Lauderdale County in the northwest corner of the state, said his office usually tries to get women into treatment programs. But he said he deals more harshly with those who have used drugs in multiple pregnancies or had a stillbirth after using.

“If you have a dead child, we don’t automatically go out and charge that person with a Class A felony,” Connolly said. “We get an autopsy done and we get the medical examiner’s opinion of whether the drugs in the system caused the death or not.”

If the medical examiner rules that drugs caused a stillbirth, Connolly said, he will go forward with the harshest charges.

“That’s the same thing as murder,” he said.

During the trial, prosecutors did not produce a witness who could conclusively say methamphetamine caused the fetus’s death. At least 30% of stillbirths and miscarriages are unexplained, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Shoemaker said her lawyer advised her not to testify. “She said, ‘They’ll rip you apart.’”

That attorney, Margaret Brown, said she gave Shoemaker the best advice she could. “I represented her to the best of my ability and never had any complaints about my representation during that period of time,” Brown said.

Most chemical endangerment cases in Alabama end in plea agreements. Sara Ainsworth, legal director of abortion rights group If/When/How, said there is a deep stigma about using drugs while pregnant that makes it hard for women to prevail in court.

“It’s not common to win in front of a jury, even when the law is on your side,” she said.

Shoemaker’s 18-year sentence separated her from her children, including the youngest, born after the arrest. And though the judge said that her time behind bars should help rehabilitate her, she said, she has encountered lots of drug use and violence. Alabama prisons are so overcrowded and understaffed that federal authorities filed a lawsuit alleging the state system violates the Constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

In less than four years, Shoemaker becomes eligible for parole. But she is not hopeful. Last year, the Alabama Bureau of Pardons and Paroles denied 84% of applications, according to the ACLU.

Her final release date is in 2038.

via The Marshall Project https://ift.tt/s59yJ86

September 1, 2022 at 06:18AM

Trial Date Set for OnlyFans, Instagram Model Charged with Murdering Boyfriend in Miami

Courtney Clenney appears in an Aug. 26, 2022 booking photo. (Image via the Miami-Dade County Jail.)

A trial date has been set for the OnlyFans and Instagram model charged with second-degree murder in connection with the bloody death of her boyfriend.

Courtney Clenney, 26, known online by the name Courtney Tailor, will face a jury on Dec. 19 at 9:30 a.m., according to a court docket in Miami-Dade County, Florida.

During a Wednesday morning hearing, Clenney’s attorney reaffirmed the defendant’s not guilty plea entered previously in writing on Aug. 15.

The defendant herself was not present during the two-minute-long hearing, FOX News reported.

Clenney remains incarcerated at the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center in Miami, according to online jail records reviewed by Law&Crime. She has been held at the facility without bond since being extradited from Hawaii last week, the records show.

Clenney stabbed her boyfriend Christian Tobechukwu “Toby” Obumseli, 27, back on Sun., April 3, fatally cutting his subclavian artery, prosecutors have said.

Those facts do not appear to be in dispute. The heart of the matter is whether Clenney acted in self-defense; her attorney claims she did. Prosecutors say her story doesn’t add up.

“We are completely shocked at Courtney’s arrest based upon the clear evidence of self defense in this matter,” Clenney’s defense attorney Frank Prieto told Law&Crime via email earlier this month. “Obumseli attacked her and choked her that evening; Courtney had no choice but to meet force with force.”

Prieto called the charge “unfounded and baseless” and said his client was “clearly defending herself.”

Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle, however, said on Aug. 11 that Clenney’s proffered version of the events doesn’t make sense when compared against the evidence.

According to Rundle, an autopsy determined that a “forceful downward thrust” of a knife caused a wound about three inches — or eight centimeters — deep in Obumseli’s chest.

The authorities allege that the force necessary to create a fatal wound of that depth likely came from an up-close-and-personal thrust of a blade.

That is a problem, Rundle has posited, because Clenney allegedly told law enforcement officers that she threw the knife at Obumseli from a distance of about 10 feet away.

Rundle said the victim and the defendant shared an “extremely tempestuous and combative relationship” that was so rancorous that it attracted significant attention from neighbors, security officials, and management at the luxury apartment building where the couple lived.

Management at the facility even considered evicting the couple “because of these many noise complaints,” Rundle indicated at a press conference on Aug. 11.

Rundle also presented surveillance camera video from an elevator in the luxury apartment complex where the ill-fated couple lived and where the stabbing subsequently occurred in the couple’s unit.

Courtney Clenney appears in an earlier mugshot (left) and in a freeze frame of a video (right) provided by the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office in Florida.

That video shows a melee between Clenney and Obumseli. Both Rundle and an attorney for Obumseli’s family said the video shows Clenney as a primary aggressor.

Clenney had a “history of being the aggressor throughout the relationship,” said Attorney Larry Handfield, who is representing the stabbing victim’s family.

“What you saw in the elevator was just an isolated glimpse of a pattern of conduct,” Handfield added.

Prieto, Clenney’s attorney, has questioned whether the video would be admissible in her upcoming trial.

Prieto did not respond to a Law&Crime request for comment about the upcoming trial date on Wednesday.

A copy of some of the charging documents in the matter is here:

The post Trial Date Set for OnlyFans, Instagram Model Charged with Murdering Boyfriend in South Florida first appeared on Law & Crime.

via Law & Crime https://lawandcrime.com

August 31, 2022 at 02:26PM

Little-Known Police Surveillance Tool Tracks ‘Patterns of Life’

Local law enforcement agencies in North and South Carolina have been utilizing a little-known smartphone monitoring program that allows them the ability to follow people’s travels from months in departments across the Carolinas, sometimes without either warrants or consent, the Associated Press reports. According to thousands of pages of corporate information, police have used “Fog Reveal” to search billions of records from 250 million mobile devices and have used the data to generate location reports that law enforcement call “patterns of life.” Fog Data Science LLC’s Fog Reveal tool has been used in criminal investigations ranging from the killing of an Arkansas nurse to locating a probable participant in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

via The Crime Report https://ift.tt/eT9ZzqJ

September 1, 2022 at 09:27AM

Saudi Arabia court sentences woman to 45 years for tweets

A Saudi Arabian court Tuesday sentenced Nourah bint Saeed al-Qahtani to 45 years prison for tweeting material the court claimed impinged upon “public order and religious values.” Not many details are known about the case yet. Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), a nonprofit organization founded by Saudi Arabian journalist and critic Jamal Khashoggi, broke the story and continues to investigate the case.

Al-Qahtani was tried and sentenced by the Appellate Division of the Specialized Criminal Court (SCC) under Saudi Arabia’s Counter-Terrorism Law and Anti-Cyber Crime Law for “using the Internet to tear the [country’s] social fabric” and “violating the public order by using social media.” Her sentence comes on the heels of the sentencing of another Saudi woman named Salma Al-Shehab to 34 years in prison, followed by a 34-year travel ban. Like al-Qahtani, Salma Al-Shehab was sentenced for having a Twitter account and retweeting posts from Saudi dissidents and human rights activists.

The SCC was first formed by the Saudi government in 2008 to deal with a backlog of terrorism cases, but it has since become a forum to target minorities and dissenters within Saudi Arabia. According to Amnesty International, the SCC has been used to punish journalists, human rights defenders, political activists, writers, religious clerics and women rights activists. The most frequently cited laws include the Counter-Terrorism Law and Anti-Cyber Crime Law. The Saudi Council of Ministers passed the Counter-Terrorism Law in 2013, and the law took effect in 2014. The law essentially prohibits any behavior that undermines the state or society by labeling the behavior as terrorism. The Anti-Cyber Crime Law was similarly passed in 2007. It prohibits the “production, preparation, transmission, or storage of material impinging on public order, religious values, public morals, or privacy, through an information network or computer.”

The post Saudi Arabia court sentences woman to 45 years for tweets appeared first on JURIST – News.

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September 1, 2022 at 12:54PM

Longest prison term yet — 10 years — given to Jan 6 rioter who assaulted police officer

As reported in this Politico piece, a ” federal judge on Thursday sentenced former New York cop Thomas Webster to 10 years in prison for assaulting a police officer outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the longest sentence handed down yet in cases that arise from the attack.”  Here is more:

U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta described Webster’s assault on D.C. police officer Noah Rathbun as one of the most haunting and shocking images from that violent day.

“I do wish you hadn’t come to Washington D.C. I do wish you had stayed home in New York, that you had not come out to the Capitol that day,” Mehta said. “Because all of us would be far better off. Not just you, your family, country. We’d all be far better off. Yet here we are.”

Mehta said he viewed Webster’s conduct as among the most egregious of any defendant sentenced so far. Until Thursday, the lengthiest sentences had been given to Texas militia member Guy Reffitt and local Virginia police officer Thomas Robertson, who were convicted by juries of attempting to obstruct congressional proceedings.

It’s the latest in a string of steeper sentences that have been issued as rioters facing felony charges — some of whom have taken their cases to trial — learn their fate from the judges who have presided over their cases for more than a year.

Images of Webster attempting to rip the gas mask off of Rathbun’s face amid broader chaos at the Capitol are among the most indelible images to emerge from the Jan. 6 attack. Mehta expressed incredulity that Webster took the stand in his own defense and attempted to argue that his effort to rip the officer’s gas mask off was really just to show him his hands and prove he wasn’t a threat.

Notably, though this case represents the longest sentencing to date for a Jan 6 rioter, the sentence of 10 years is still a full 7+ years below what the federal sentencing guidelines recommended (and what the federal prosecutors requested).

Some of many prior related posts:

via Sentencing Law and Policy https://ift.tt/VYWMFDA

September 1, 2022 at 05:54PM

Faulty Drug Testing May Have Falsely Convicted Thousands in Michigan 

Director of the Michigan State Police Forensic Science Division Jeffrey Nye informed state prosecutors in a letter Wednesday that the department’s drug tests could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that drivers were under the influence of cannabis, The Detroit Metro Times reports. The letter was released less than a week after Michigan State Police stopped conducting marijuana blood testing due to false positive results for THC, the psychoactive component of cannabis. The toxicology tests were unable to differentiate between THC and CBD, a chemical component that is not psychoactive and does not cause intoxication.

According to the Detroit Metro Times, Michigan State Police relied on faulty testing to produce criminal charges in about 3,250 cases since March 2019, in which a driver was allegedly under the influence of marijuana and no other drugs or alcohol. Up to 3,250 individuals may have been wrongly charged and found guilty as a result of flawed testing. Following the revelations, defense attorneys are anticipated to start contesting their clients’ convictions and state police have stated that they will alert prosecutors about individuals who may have been wrongly convicted.

via The Crime Report https://ift.tt/eT9ZzqJ

September 2, 2022 at 09:33AM

Sheriff Mocks Useless ‘Get Out of Jail Free Card’ Spotted in Wallet After Florida Man Accused of Murder on His Birthday

Grady Judd (left) in an unrelated press conference in August 2022. Thomas Jackson in a booking photo.

A man is accused of shooting and killing someone else on his own birthday over the weekend.

Deputies in Polk County, Florida, claim defendant Thomas Jackson, 35, had a card in his wallet suggesting what to tell investigators. They are using this against the defendant in the new second-degree murder case.

“Jackson had a post incident wallet card which instructed him what to tell law enforcement,” Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said in a press statement. “If he thought he could murder someone and use this as get out of jail free card, he was sadly mistaken.”

Deputies said the killing happened early Saturday morning. Law enforcement responded to the area of Meadow Green Drive in unincorporated Davenport. There was a reported shooting.

Deputies arrived to find a witness performing CPR on the victim in the front yard of the residence. Polk Fire Rescue soon arrived and pronounced the victim dead.

According to authorities, Jackson, his girlfriend, and another couple were celebrating his birthday. They had all been drinking.

At some point, Jackson and his girlfriend began arguing, deputies said. The victim took him outside in an attempt to calm him down, but moments later, the two women inside the home heard gunshots, according to the press statement. They found Jackson standing over the victim, deputies said. There was allegedly a handgun on the ground.

“One of the witnesses confronted Jackson and the other began life saving measures,” authorities said.

Jackson allegedly told detectives the victim “came at me.”

But deputies said he had a certain card in his wallet. From authorities:

He also had a small wallet size card with instructions about what to say “post-incident” that included claiming that the person with the card was being attacked. Detectives did not observe injuries on Jackson nor the victim “to suggest that great bodily harm was a factor” nor was there evidence on the ground to suggest a struggle took place.

According to deputies, witnesses said that Jackson was known to pull out a weapon on people during conflicts before. He had also been in a physical fight with someone else the day before, authorities said.

Deputies noted a criminal history with arrests in Florida, Virginia, and Georgia. In regard to his case out of the Sunshine State, records show prosecutors dropped a charge of aggravated battery with a deadly weapon on Jan. 7, 2016.

Jackson remains at the Polk County Jail without bond, records show.

An arraignment is set for Sept. 27.

[Screenshot of Judd via WTSP; Booking photo of Jackson via Polk County Sheriff’s Office]

The post Sheriff Mocks Useless ‘Get Out of Jail Free Card’ Spotted in Wallet After Florida Man Accused of Murder on His Birthday first appeared on Law & Crime.

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September 1, 2022 at 01:20PM

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