Posted on 05/31/2007 12:51:13 PM PDT by Responsibility2nd
A Michigan man has been fined $400 and given 40 hours of community service for accessing an open wireless Internet connection outside a coffee shop.
Under a little known state law against computer hackers, Sam Peterson II, of Cedar Springs, Mich., faced a felony charge after cops found him on March 27 sitting in front of the Re-Union Street Café in Sparta, Mich., surfing the Web from his brand-new laptop.
Last week, Peterson chose the fine as part of a jail-diversion program.
"I think a lot of people should be shocked, because quite honestly, I still don't understand it myself," Peterson told FOXNews.com "I do not understand how this is illegal."
His troubles began in March, a couple of weeks after he had bought his first laptop computer.
Peterson, a 39-year-old tool maker, volunteer firefighter and secretary of a bagpipe band, wanted to use his 30-minute lunch hour to check e-mails for his bagpipe group.
He got on the Internet by tapping into the local coffee shop's wireless network, but instead of going inside the shop to use the free Wi-Fi offered to paying customers, he chose to remain in his car and piggyback off the network, which he said didn't require a password.
He used the system on his lunch breaks for more than a week, and then the police showed up.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
He was arrested for breaking a law that he was, in fact, breaking. It's silly that his actions were considered a felony, but write your legislator on that. But if he hadn't been behaving strangely, none of this would ever have become an issue.
I know that we spend most of our time on FR arguing law, and philosophy and principle. I'm stepping back from that and being practical in this case. No matter how perfect my defense, I'd rather stay out of court.
You ever going to back up your claim?
The guy would have been a lot better off if he'd just bought a cup of coffee and sat in his car drinking it with one hand and surfing with the other. Then nobody, including the cop, could say he wasn't a customer. Duh!
That is still one expensive cup of coffee he never drank! I still think the law is stupid though. The System in this case was looking at getting easy money, and they were right.
This is a prime example the sheep like behavior of our citizenry to allow this to happen.
The proper response in this great nation of self governing, informed citizens, would be to horsewhip the stupid police chief.
And then to put him in stocks on the town square.
I think it’s easy for prosecutors to lose real world perspective. In the “system,” prosecutors and defense attorneys are going to work out almost every felony case without a trial. Defense attorneys are obviously trying to get the best deals they can get for their clients, and prosecutors are trying to settle all their cases, giving in as little as possible. Most prosecutors will try to be fair and reasonable when it comes to silly cases like this one, but they’re so used to this everyday struggle with defense attorneys it’s hard for them to give in too much. That makes them feel like they’ve lost, and of course they hate to lose. Do they really care that much about a measly $400? Not really. They don’t get that money. It’s more about the game I think.
The big system problem in a case like this starts with the legislators who wrote an overly broad law, one that encompasses too much conduct. I guess it probably should be illegal to use someone else’s wireless network without permission. You’re stealing their bandwidth, which can slow things down for them. And of course there is a security issue as well. It’s not hard at all to get on everyone’s computer in an unencrypted network and steal passwords, look at emails, get into private files, etc. People should use WEP encryption at least, but a lot don’t. I don’t have a problem with it being illegal to access a computer network without permission. But should it be a felony to use a network to check your email when that network is unencrypted and shows up in your wireless software as an open network, especially if it’s one provided free as was the case in this instance? I don’t know how you put a price on bandwidth, but certainly what this man “stole” couldn’t have been worth more than a couple of pennies, at most. It shouldn’t be a felony. The legislators need to write a better law, perhaps even making a specific law that pertains to this very type of relatively innocent access. It ought to be a minor misdemeanor at least. Then when prosecutors and defense attorneys are playing their little plea negotiation game the prosecutor won’t feel like he’s got the defendant over the barrel so much and he’ll be a lot more reasonable in cases like these.
The cop didn't just wander up because he was bored. He was called by the owner of the hair salon, who'd had one of his employees stalked before.
The salon owner thought that someone pulling into the parking lot every day, idling there, and then driving off without getting out of the car was creepy and worrisome. In his position I would think the same.
“The salon owner thought that someone pulling into the parking lot every day, idling there, and then driving off without getting out of the car was creepy and worrisome.”
Then why didn’t they charge the guy with loitering instead?
That's exactly the problem. They don't, and what is worse, they don't care if they don't. They have the power of the state behind them, they know it, and they don't care if they use that power to intimidate. They know others in the system will never hold them accountable.
You are right however, it is all about "the game" and the bigger the ego, the worse it is. Don't we have enough problems with crime without having to make the ordinary citizen look like a hardened, incorrigible criminal on paper? The legal racket is just ridiculous.
I often feel that way myself, and I’m part of the system. I play the game everyday. I’ve got about 140 felony clients right now and I handle piles and piles of misdemeanor and juvenile cases. I don’t know how many I do in a year, but it’s some ungodly ridiculous number of cases. I’ve got a dozen adult felony pleas set for next week, and if I work out all the cases I have set for jury trial next week I’ll end up doing probably closer to twenty felony pleas in one day. One I know will be for jury trial for sure, but there is a possibly I might have to try two next week. I’m a public defender and all we can do is try to make sure people don’t get screwed in the system, but things don’t always work out like they should. Prosecutors aren’t all bad though. In this particular case I think the worst culprit is the legislature that wrote such an overly inclusive law, making something so minor a felony, lumping it in with far worse crimes. This type of conduct this fellow engaged in should be excluded from the definition of this particular felony crime. It would have been nice if the prosecutor had have gone easier on this guy, perhaps letting him off with a warning or something not as stiff as what he got, but then again this guy could have come out of this in a lot worse shape. The legislature needs to rewrite the law so people don’t get screwed even worse than this guy got screwed.
That is why I said sayonara to the law, and I’m glad I did!
We have our hands full in Delaware. The system is horribly corrupt and to make things worse, we have Joe Biden Jr. as our new Attorney General--who doesn't have the balls to fire prosecutors who demonstrate a lack of discretion, or to go after the monsters in the system who ruin people's lives on purpose and waste taxpayer money--all so to have their power trip. No, they cover it up for them. There are people in the system breaking the law, and they get away with it.
Thank God, there will be a payday, someday, for people like these.
As for prosecutors needing to get a grip sometimes, I agree with that. I don’t really think they care much about taxpayer money though. They might pay lip service to that come election time, but as a general rule they could care less. They want to keep their numbers up. They want high conviction rates. A lot of their budget comes from the county where I live, so they like to jack the fines up to come out looking like heroes to the county. They also rely a lot on asset forfeiture funds where I live so are alway trying to seize assets. Often these “seized” assets really just come in the form of a big lump sum payment by defendants at the time of the plea. Come up with enough money and you can buy a better deal. The more money you can come up with up front the better the deal. That kind of sucks for my clients because if they qualify for the public defender they aren’t generally going to come up with thousands of dollars all at once. I’ve seen cases where people have come up with over a hundred grand and gotten some really sweet deals. It’s kind of depressing to see your client caught with a couple of grams of cocaine get a lot worse deal than some guy who got caught with a couple hundred pounds of cocaine, standing up there in his several thousand dollar tailored suit with his two fancy out of state attorneys. I guess money is what makes the world go around. And I’ve had clients come up with a few grand to stay out of prison or get much shorter sentences too so I can’t complain much.
Back to taxpayer money though, one of the big problems I think is that prosecutors and counties in general really don’t have to worry about state monies expended on the criminal justice system. They can put as many people in prison as they want, far exceed the state per capita incarceration rate costing taxpayers from other counties a lot of money, and there is no penalty for that whatsoever. It’s not their money they’re wasting, it’s the state’s money. They could care less if they are using these resources judiciously or not. They get all the revenues from fines, but they don’t have to pay for any of the prison bed space they use up. In most all states counties pay for their jails, but pay nothing for the people they sentence to state prisons. In some states the state even pays for the county jails.
Incarceration rates in this country have soared since the late seventies. They were relatively flat until the late seventies and in 1979 we hit a new record. Now they stand at several times what they were in 1979 and they continue to climb. We now lock up more people than any other country in the world. We have something like %5 of the world’s population, yet around 25% of all the people behind bars in this world are behind bars right here in the land of the free. It’s entirely unprecedented, a radical departure from anything we’ve ever done in the past in this country. There is nothing even remotely conservative about our liberal use of prison in this country. For several years now we’ve had the world’s highest per capita incarceration rate, several times higher than the world average, several times higher than most of our Western counterparts in the “free world.”
I bet if we started rationing prison bed space out to counties on a per capita basis and made the counties pay at least a portion of the costs of prison when they go over their allotment we’d see the rise in incarceration rates grind to a halt overnight. Whether judges or juries were doing the sentencing, they’d use a lot better sense, as would elected prosecutors who would have to answer to voters if their policies cost the county money. And prosecutors would be a lot more receptive to the argument that certain cases just need need to be dropped, or that reasonable offers need to be made for the taxpayers’ sake.
In Delaware we don’t have county prosecutors. They work for the State DOJ.
Oh, and they aren’t elected either. The AG is elected though.
Only a few cops in our nation are brave enough to bust the secretary of bagpipe band.
For instance, we're working on getting some of those mandatory sentencing laws revised. Why? The prisons are filling up. Child molesters are being let out or in some cases not even prosecuted, while a teenage kid with a joint in his pocket or drinking a beer on his driveway gets the book thrown at him. It would be cheaper to pay a fine (like a ticket) instead of wasting thousands prosecuting. The poor guy accessing the *free* wireless access got hosed likewise. Go figure.
Our public defenders are really sick of this crap. Child advocates (like myself) are likewise irritated. And we're all sick and tired of Ruth Ann Minner (the Governor) who appoints a lot of these nasty, corrupt cronies who should be locked up themselves, along with her...the old bat!
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