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Justice wasn’t served in Tidwell gun-theft case
FORMER San Bernardino County Sheriff Floyd Tidwell's plea bargain on charges of stealing more than 500 guns during his tenure has led to a reduced sentence that saves the public nothing, even as it saves Tidwell from going to prison.
Justice, indeed, has been cheated. And so have law-abiding citizens, who expect that San Bernardino County's one-time top law enforcement officer be held liable for his transgressions.
Instead, Judge J. Michael Welch on Tuesday reduced Tidwell's felony charges to misdemeanors, sentenced him to three years' probation and fined him $10,000.
Welch seemed to wink and look the other way at Tidwell's contemptible practice of lifting guns from the Sheriff's Department's property room and rewarding them willy-nilly to sworn deputies, reserve deputies, volunteers and even his two sons, Danial and Steven, both deputies at the time.
In letting Tidwell off the hook, Welch dismissed the whole affair as a bygone custom something out of the era of cowboy sheriffs that has since been discontinued. We would think that this kind of good old boy favoritism doesn't happen in Los Angeles County under Sheriff Lee Baca and District Attorney Steve Cooley. Right?
Still, Tidwell's hypocrisy is something far less innocent than that when a sheriff thinks nothing of pilfering firearms, disposing of them however he pleases, and then suffering no accountability for it.
Nor has Tidwell admitted any wrongdoing. He pleaded guilty in May to four felony counts of concealing stolen property.
Part of the plea agreement is that Tidwell return the weapons. Though prosecutors believe he may have absconded with more than 1,000 guns while sheriff (he served from 1983 to 1991), Tidwell thus far has returned only about 160 of them.
For that, Tidwell walks away, chewing his tobacco, a free man. He still will draw his pension, though whether he will be allowed to remain a volunteer is still up in the air.
Will he have to pay even some small price for his misdeeds? That he has not been given the punishment he deserves is a disgrace to the legal system and an object lesson of what not to do for all law enforcement everywhere. It's also a betrayal of honest folks who put their faith in the law.
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If it were you or me we'd be spending a long time out at Glen Helen Prison wouldn't we?
