Prosecutors should send a clear message

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July 21, 2010

Anonymous Pharos-Tribune Sat Jul 24, 2010, 06:23 PM EDT

It’s the perfect movie. A barely schooled, shoeless teenager dodges

police as he races across the country stealing cars and airplanes

before finally being caught in a high-speed boat chase.

The kid’s mom has already hired a well-known entertainment lawyer

who says he is being swamped by unsolicited offers. You can

almost hear the cash registers ringing.

Nineteen-year-old Colton Harris-Moore was arrested in the

Bahamas a week after he reportedly crash-landed there in a plane

stolen July 4 from an Indiana airport. The teenager made initial court

appearances in Florida last week before heading back to Seattle,

where he faces a federal charge in the crash-landing of a plane

stolen from Idaho last year.

The self-taught pilot is suspected in more than 70 crimes across

nine states since he walked away from a halfway house in April

2008, and he still has two years left on the sentence he walked away

from in 2008.

Some prosecutors have expressed interest in negotiating a “global”

plea deal to resolve all or most of the charges.

But here’s the thing. There is no way that the teenager or his mother

should cash that first check.

After all, if it turns out there’s a fortune to be made by having your kid

take off on a cross-country crime spree, what’s to stop the next

enterprising parent and child from trying to do the Barefoot Bandit

one better?

If they do nothing else, prosecutors must send a clear message that

while crime might well be a way to achieve fame, it is not the path to

fortune. And they should make sure that any profit to be made from

the bandit’s exploits goes to his victims, the people whose planes

and cars and boats he’s accused of stealing.

They could follow the example set by prosecutors in the case of

“American Taliban” John Walker Lindh, who pleaded guilty in 2002

to supplying support for the Taliban in exchange for a 20-year

sentence. As part of his plea, Lindh agreed that any profits from

publicity deals would be turned over to the U.S. government, and he

pledged not to communicate with relatives or associates to help

them profit from his story.

Similar language should be part of any plea bargains negotiated in

the case of the Barefoot Bandit.

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Prosecutors should send a clear message

The U.S. Postal Service is scaling back hours at about 13,000 post offices across the country so that it can keep open about 3,700 post offices it had targeted for closing. Do you support this plan?

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