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Jacobia Grimes, 34, was spotted by a store manager stuffing his pockets full of chocolates at about 2:30pm on December 9, according to the New Orleans Advocate. He willingly emptied his pockets and did not resist during the arrest.
On February 3, his crime was boosted to the status of a felony deserving of two years' incarceration. Grimes is a career shoplifter, and state law allows the system more leeway if a man has been convicted of "theft of goods" at least twice before.
In this case the number of times is five. This in turn qualifies Grimes for the 20 years to life, as a "habitual offender." Grimes had already been put away for four years in 2010 by the same district attorney, Leon Cannizzaro.
Reform advocates have long considered Louisiana among the toughest states in the country for habitual-offender laws. Grimes is being slapped with a 'multiple bill' - something even Judge Franz Zibilich found to be an exaggeration of the severity of Grimes' crime.
"Isn't this a little over the top?" Zibilich was quoted, wondering out-loud. "It's not even funny. Twenty years to life for a Snickers bar, or two or three or four," he added.
Grimes pleaded not guilty on Thursday, a change from guilty pleas in the period from 2001 to 2010.
The issue with the 'multiple bill' legal tactic taken up by the prosecution leaves almost no discretion to the judge, and almost certainly means a very severe sentence in Louisiana.
Legal experts and rights advocates continue to oppose the state's tough sentencing system, especially the multiple billing statutes. Grimes would have been charged with multiple misdemeanor elsewhere in the US.
Grimes' attorneys, Miles Swanson and Michael Kennedy, believe the statute is "ridiculous" and that it is "unconscionably excessive to threaten someone with 20 years to life for candy."
The DA's office declined to comment on the specifics of the case.
Grimes, who currently also faces charges for possessing drug paraphernalia, has been released on $5,000 bail. He's due in court next on Wednesday.
Stealing A Snickers Is MORE evil than selling or snorting .... Drano... and yet, no one questions when folks so latterly charged get put away for life on such BULLSHIT charges.
I'm NOT saying that this overcharging was right; simply that there are real crimes (malum in se, "evil in and of themselves," such as here), and then there's the Super-propagandized "Made-Up-By-The-PTB" Crimes, (malum prohibitum, "it's evil because, we, the PTB, say so.") such as snorting... Drano, or whatever.
Insanity. ("But now I know that"* it was pre-planned from before we were born by the pappies and grand 'Poppies' of 'our' PTB.
R.C.
*Keats saw the future better than most:
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
-- William Butler Yeats, January 1919
RC