http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/front/5033073.htm
Gun law tough, but is aim true?
Ex-cons are getting harsher sentences if caught with firearms. Critics say some are being targeted unfairly.
By Craig R. McCoy
Inquirer Staff Writer
Soon, Devon Moore and Rodney Pagan will pay for picking up the gun.
Next month, these Philadelphia men will be sentenced under a tough program in which ex-cons are given long terms in federal prison if caught carrying a firearm.
Prosecutors love it. They tell of locking up career crooks and felons who put guns in children's hands. Their program goes after the "worst of the worst," they say.
Defense lawyers scoff. "It's a classic case of using a sledgehammer to kill a gnat," says a lawyer who represented Pagan.
Are Moore and Pagan gnats? Or something far more threatening?
Moore pleaded guilty late last year to illegally carrying a gun. Police had caught him with a 9mm pistol in 2001 while arresting him on a carjacking charge.
Before that, Moore, 31, had been imprisoned twice - for shooting up a house and for firing an Uzi in a North Philadelphia shoot-out. His eight other arrests died in local courts.
In the words of prosecutors, the 31-year-old has "made drug trafficking and the open display and cavalier treatment of firearms a part of his 'family' life.' "
Their most chilling exhibit: A 1996 snapshot of Moore's baby son, in diapers, grasping a 9mm pistol with both hands.
As for Pagan, he, too, pleaded guilty last year to illegal gun possession. He faces a tougher sentence than Moore because he has three past felony convictions. Moore has two.
Both Pagan's attorney and prosecutors believe he will get 15 years in prison under a federal law that hammers gun felons who arrive in court with three past convictions. By contrast, Moore faces a maximum of 10 years, but is expected to receive something less.
Pagan was convicted of drug dealing in 1994 after he was caught with 19 vials of crack cocaine, and in 1991 he was convicted of trying to break into a building.
His third strike? A week before Christmas in 1990, Pagan, then 19, broke into a model-train warehouse - and stole a train worth $15.20.
•
On Thursday, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft is scheduled to come to Philadelphia to talk up the program that has netted Moore, Pagan, and hundreds of other defendants targeted by federal prosecutors as gun criminals since 1999.
Ashcroft is to address the first national convention of Operation Safe Neighborhoods. Last year, Ashcroft ordered all federal prosecutors to replicate the Philadelphia program and expand it to suburban counties.
Under the initiative, federal prosecutors are "adopting" arrests made by local police, pushing successfully for harsh sentences in faraway federal prisons.
The Philadelphia program was called Operation Cease Fire when it began, at the urging of unexpected allies: then-Mayor Ed Rendell and actor Charlton Heston. Rendell challenged Heston, the president of the National Rifle Association, to make Philadelphia a big-city test of a favorite NRA argument: We don't need new gun laws; we need to enforce the ones we have.
Quietly, the program has transformed the U.S. Attorney's Office here. Gun crimes, once a low-status nuisance for the feds, now make up fully one-third of prosecutions.
Prosecutors hope the program will transform city streets as well. The early evidence is positive: New figures show that firearms violence is falling.
But critics include defense lawyers, some gun-rights advocates, and conservative academic and legal scholars. They say the program tends to target the wrong people.
They acknowledge that Safe Neighborhoods has nailed some truly dangerous gun criminals. But they say it often imposes harsh and unfair sentences on defendants with stale and unthreatening records.
Since 1999, federal prosecutors have indicted 1,075 people in Philadelphia and its suburbs as part of this program. The conviction rate? A whopping 95 percent. The average sentence is 10 years.
In Philadelphia and elsewhere, the idea is to do an end run around the seeming inability of local courts to deal sternly with gun cases. In 2001, city court records show, 88 percent of those convicted of carrying illegal guns got probation or less than two years behind bars.
Some U.S. attorneys nationally have turned up their noses at the initiative. Not Patrick L. Meehan, the U.S. attorney here.
"The idea of the program," Meehan said, "is to be surgical - to identify those who are most violent, who have a history, and to take them down."
•
Moore's defense attorney says his client is not all that bad.
"They're trying to depict him as a continuing major player in the streets of Philadelphia," David S. Nenner said. "We vehemently deny that."
In October 2001, police went looking for Moore on an arrest warrant accusing him and two others of brutally beating a man and stealing his car in a quarrel over cocaine.
When police stopped Moore, he told them he was carrying a gun. They removed a 9mm pistol from his pants pocket.
The feds agreed to prosecute Moore as a felon in illegal possession of a gun. He pleaded guilty last fall.
It was his third conviction among 11 arrests since becoming an adult.
At 18, Moore was convicted of pulling a gun from a trench coat and firing up to nine shots into a house. Two years later, he was given a second jail term for firing an Uzi. Six years later, he was stopped in a car with two AK-47 assault-rifle "banana" clips, a box of shotgun shells, and a bulletproof vest. He was not arrested for that.
His other arrests - for a pair of shootings, a couple for crack deals, among other cases - were mostly dropped.
Prosecutors say the cases collapsed because victims would not testify. Nenner says the police simply arrested the wrong man.
By law, Moore could now get up to 10 years for his federal conviction. Sentencing guidelines call for Moore to receive three years; prosecutors have asked a judge to double that.
To justify such a sentence, prosecutors have filed with the court a packet of photographs taken in 1996. They say the photos came from a confidential source.
Along with Moore's pistol-toting son, the snapshots show Moore posing with stacks of cash and the same pistol.
"When the defendant brazenly displayed this handgun for the camera and let his infant play with it, he had been previously convicted of two firearms offenses," Assistant U.S. Attorney Eric B. Henson wrote to the sentencing judge.
Defense lawyer Nenner said the photos were staged as promotional pictures to raise money for a possible video or musical retelling of Moore's troubled early life.
The gun wasn't Moore's and wasn't loaded, Nenner said. As for the image of the child posing, the lawyer said, "I'm not saying it's in the best taste in the world."
In 1995, an unsolved shooting left Moore with a barely functioning kidney. After that, Nenner said, "he got out of a life of violent crime."
What about his five arrests since 1995? "An arrest is nothing more than an accusation," Nenner said.
Since Moore was shot, Nenner said, he has made a living as a landlord and as a music producer.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert K. Reed, head of the federal program here, called Moore's arrest sheet "frightening."
"We have to ask, 'Why is this person constantly getting in trouble with the law?' " Reed said. "He may be the unluckiest person in the world, but generally that is not the case."
•
It all began with a handshake.
In 1998, NRA president Heston joined up with Rendell, now Pennsylvania governor but then a mayor seeking modest gun-control measures, to urge that Philadelphia become the first big city to aggressively enforce existing federal gun laws.
The two men were picking up on an existing program in Richmond, Va., one-eighth the size of Philadelphia, that had received much favorable press.
Since the Philadelphia program was founded, the number of gun crimes in the city generally has fallen.
Mayor Street has cited his Safe Streets program, under which police last year swarmed drug corners, as one reason for the change. Prosecutor Reed said the federal crackdown, too, had helped.
"I'm not surprised that the numbers are coming down," Reed said. "And I think we're part of it."
Criminologists are unsure. While the Philadelphia program has not been subjected to outside study, a recent report on Richmond's concluded that the crime decrease there had only a little to do with the feds.
In a study for the Brookings Institution, two scholars found that cities similar to Richmond saw the same drop in crime - without any antigun program. The authors said a burning-out of crack violence might be among the reasons.
"The Clinton administration and Charlton Heston, the most unlikely allies possible, said we have the crime-fighting equivalent of a cure for cancer," said study coauthor Jens Ludwig, a Georgetown University professor. "What we found is that it was more like aspirin. That's not to say aspirin is bad. But aspirin is aspirin."
While the number of gun crimes is dropping in Philadelphia, the problem remains huge. Each day last year, an average of 19 people were robbed or threatened at gunpoint, or shot.
Statistics aside, prosecutors say the federal initiative has changed criminal behavior.
"We find that drug traffickers are actually setting up their operations so that very few of the dealers on the streets have firearms," said Deputy District Attorney George Mosee, who until recently served as liaison to the program.
In a report last year on the program, federal prosecutors quoted a defendant as overheard on a prison telephone. The inmate warned about carrying "burners" - slang for guns.
"The feds down there... . This is vicious," the man said. "Yo, man, they is not playing with the burners, man. Any of them dudes you know with them burners, you better tell them they better fall back."
•
Rodney Pagan didn't get that message.
He fell into the federal grasp after Philadelphia police chased him down early last year. They arrested him after a man ran up to a patrol car and yelled that Pagan had pulled a gun.
Pagan dumped the .22-caliber gun (with an obliterated serial number) as he ran, but police recovered it. For Pagan, carrying that gun was crime in itself. State and federal laws bar felons from having guns.
"I found this gun, picked it up," an unconvincing Pagan said in federal court. "Didn't think about it. The cop stopped me. I didn't want to be caught. I threw it."
His past convictions included three felonies, one for dealing crack and two burglaries - including the toy-train theft.
Under federal law, three such convictions meant Pagan could be treated as an "armed career criminal" facing a mandatory 15 years. This statute is one of the toughest provisions of Operation Safe Neighborhoods.
"Certainly, you will have some people whose records will suggest they should be given as much time as you can give them," said Kenneth Edelin, the assistant federal defender who represented Pagan. "Mr. Pagan is certainly not that person."
But the feds have no sympathy for a sob story about a model train stolen before a holiday. Before they got their hands on Pagan, they point out, he had been arrested nine times. Pagan, now 31, had beaten burglary, robbery and carjacking charges.
"This is the type of person who presents himself as a one-man crime wave, though we cannot catch him every time," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Bea L. Witzleben, who prosecuted Pagan. "He's had his three strikes and now he needs to be taken out of the community for a sizable period of time."
•
For some prosecutors and judges, Safe Neighborhoods' gun cases have been a comedown from, say, headline-making corruption or fraud trials.
At one time, said Reed, "There was no way federal prosecutors and judges would handle this stuff. It was too small, too nothing, too insignificant.
"There was a mindset in my office - it was not a plum to work on a firearms case. They wanted to work on a big fraud case. That has really changed now."
In 1999, a chief judge in Richmond complained that his federal district had been "transformed into a minor-grade police court."
Some judges have more serious qualms. They say the program is a step toward a federal police force. Criticism has also been leveled by some legal scholars, along with some lesser-known gun-rights groups.
In 2001, U.S. District Judge Stewart Dalzell in Philadelphia affirmed a guilty verdict for a man with a past robbery conviction who had been caught with a 9mm handgun, but did so unhappily. He urged an appellate court to overturn the conviction, saying the felon had "committed no federal crime."
•
In Philadelphia, Safe Neighborhoods is headed by Reed, 48, a button-down prosecutor with a track record in fighting street crime. "You try to take off the worst of the worst," Reed said. "There are people alive today and people who have not been victimized because these people are doing years in jail."
Reed directs about 30 prosecutors and other staff in the U.S. Attorney's Office here, newly assisted by 20 local prosecutors from elsewhere in eastern Pennsylvania. Under new orders from Ashcroft, Safe Neighborhoods expanded last year to eight counties outside Philadelphia, including Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery.
Federal prosecutors in New Jersey brought 73 cases statewide last year, about a third of them in Camden County.
To prevail in court, prosecutors need only show that a felon had a gun and previous felony convictions. With the cases so simple, guilty pleas seem to come easily.
In a war of anecdotes, defense lawyers and prosecutors have squared off over whether the program nabs the worst of the worst.
Public defender Rossman Thompson stood by last fall as his client, Ernest Soda Jr., pleaded guilty to illegally possessing a handgun. Thompson knew Soda was looking at 15 years.
At 44, Soda was shuttled into federal court after his arrest last March - for shoplifting.
A diagnosed schizophrenic who at times has heard voices, Soda was acting strangely when police arrived. They took him to a hospital, where he asked to go to the men's room. Police said they kept watch - and saw a loaded .22 fall from his pants.
Soda's past crimes qualified him for federal prosecution. In 1992, he'd grabbed an elderly woman's purse and slammed her head against a steering wheel. That same year, he tried to rob a La Salle University student, saying he had a gun.
His first strike was a break-in, 15 years ago. Police caught him in a drugstore, trying to jimmy cash registers, 11 cents and half a ripped $10 bill in his pockets.
"It is really a sad case," said his attorney, Thompson. "You have an individual with some mental-health problems who was involved in shoplifting. My personal belief is that for possession of a firearm, 15 years is just incredibly ridiculous. It's disproportionate to the offense."
Rummaging through his files, prosecutor Reed cites an outrage of his own - the business dealings of Sylvester Kitchen, 37, of North Philadelphia, who traveled from gun shop to gun shop in 2001, buying 18 cheap handguns that he later sold on the street at a 100 percent profit. Kitchen was convicted of this last year.
Two of the guns he sold have been recovered. One was fired by a man angry over a fender-bender. The shots wounded Julio Muniz Jr. in the stomach and legs, leaving him disabled, with a metal rod in his right leg.
Muniz welcomes the five-year federal sentence given the gun supplier.
"I was an auto mechanic," said Muniz, 32, and father of six children. "In essence, I am now just unemployed because my leg bothers me so much. Towards the end of the day, I can't move because of the pain."
The other recovered gun?
It was found inside a child's bookbag at a Philadelphia elementary school.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gun law tough, but is aim true?
Ex-cons are getting harsher sentences if caught with firearms. Critics say some are being targeted unfairly.
By Craig R. McCoy
Inquirer Staff Writer
Soon, Devon Moore and Rodney Pagan will pay for picking up the gun.
Next month, these Philadelphia men will be sentenced under a tough program in which ex-cons are given long terms in federal prison if caught carrying a firearm.
Prosecutors love it. They tell of locking up career crooks and felons who put guns in children's hands. Their program goes after the "worst of the worst," they say.
Defense lawyers scoff. "It's a classic case of using a sledgehammer to kill a gnat," says a lawyer who represented Pagan.
Are Moore and Pagan gnats? Or something far more threatening?
Moore pleaded guilty late last year to illegally carrying a gun. Police had caught him with a 9mm pistol in 2001 while arresting him on a carjacking charge.
Before that, Moore, 31, had been imprisoned twice - for shooting up a house and for firing an Uzi in a North Philadelphia shoot-out. His eight other arrests died in local courts.
In the words of prosecutors, the 31-year-old has "made drug trafficking and the open display and cavalier treatment of firearms a part of his 'family' life.' "
Their most chilling exhibit: A 1996 snapshot of Moore's baby son, in diapers, grasping a 9mm pistol with both hands.
As for Pagan, he, too, pleaded guilty last year to illegal gun possession. He faces a tougher sentence than Moore because he has three past felony convictions. Moore has two.
Both Pagan's attorney and prosecutors believe he will get 15 years in prison under a federal law that hammers gun felons who arrive in court with three past convictions. By contrast, Moore faces a maximum of 10 years, but is expected to receive something less.
Pagan was convicted of drug dealing in 1994 after he was caught with 19 vials of crack cocaine, and in 1991 he was convicted of trying to break into a building.
His third strike? A week before Christmas in 1990, Pagan, then 19, broke into a model-train warehouse - and stole a train worth $15.20.
•
On Thursday, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft is scheduled to come to Philadelphia to talk up the program that has netted Moore, Pagan, and hundreds of other defendants targeted by federal prosecutors as gun criminals since 1999.
Ashcroft is to address the first national convention of Operation Safe Neighborhoods. Last year, Ashcroft ordered all federal prosecutors to replicate the Philadelphia program and expand it to suburban counties.
Under the initiative, federal prosecutors are "adopting" arrests made by local police, pushing successfully for harsh sentences in faraway federal prisons.
The Philadelphia program was called Operation Cease Fire when it began, at the urging of unexpected allies: then-Mayor Ed Rendell and actor Charlton Heston. Rendell challenged Heston, the president of the National Rifle Association, to make Philadelphia a big-city test of a favorite NRA argument: We don't need new gun laws; we need to enforce the ones we have.
Quietly, the program has transformed the U.S. Attorney's Office here. Gun crimes, once a low-status nuisance for the feds, now make up fully one-third of prosecutions.
Prosecutors hope the program will transform city streets as well. The early evidence is positive: New figures show that firearms violence is falling.
But critics include defense lawyers, some gun-rights advocates, and conservative academic and legal scholars. They say the program tends to target the wrong people.
They acknowledge that Safe Neighborhoods has nailed some truly dangerous gun criminals. But they say it often imposes harsh and unfair sentences on defendants with stale and unthreatening records.
Since 1999, federal prosecutors have indicted 1,075 people in Philadelphia and its suburbs as part of this program. The conviction rate? A whopping 95 percent. The average sentence is 10 years.
In Philadelphia and elsewhere, the idea is to do an end run around the seeming inability of local courts to deal sternly with gun cases. In 2001, city court records show, 88 percent of those convicted of carrying illegal guns got probation or less than two years behind bars.
Some U.S. attorneys nationally have turned up their noses at the initiative. Not Patrick L. Meehan, the U.S. attorney here.
"The idea of the program," Meehan said, "is to be surgical - to identify those who are most violent, who have a history, and to take them down."
•
Moore's defense attorney says his client is not all that bad.
"They're trying to depict him as a continuing major player in the streets of Philadelphia," David S. Nenner said. "We vehemently deny that."
In October 2001, police went looking for Moore on an arrest warrant accusing him and two others of brutally beating a man and stealing his car in a quarrel over cocaine.
When police stopped Moore, he told them he was carrying a gun. They removed a 9mm pistol from his pants pocket.
The feds agreed to prosecute Moore as a felon in illegal possession of a gun. He pleaded guilty last fall.
It was his third conviction among 11 arrests since becoming an adult.
At 18, Moore was convicted of pulling a gun from a trench coat and firing up to nine shots into a house. Two years later, he was given a second jail term for firing an Uzi. Six years later, he was stopped in a car with two AK-47 assault-rifle "banana" clips, a box of shotgun shells, and a bulletproof vest. He was not arrested for that.
His other arrests - for a pair of shootings, a couple for crack deals, among other cases - were mostly dropped.
Prosecutors say the cases collapsed because victims would not testify. Nenner says the police simply arrested the wrong man.
By law, Moore could now get up to 10 years for his federal conviction. Sentencing guidelines call for Moore to receive three years; prosecutors have asked a judge to double that.
To justify such a sentence, prosecutors have filed with the court a packet of photographs taken in 1996. They say the photos came from a confidential source.
Along with Moore's pistol-toting son, the snapshots show Moore posing with stacks of cash and the same pistol.
"When the defendant brazenly displayed this handgun for the camera and let his infant play with it, he had been previously convicted of two firearms offenses," Assistant U.S. Attorney Eric B. Henson wrote to the sentencing judge.
Defense lawyer Nenner said the photos were staged as promotional pictures to raise money for a possible video or musical retelling of Moore's troubled early life.
The gun wasn't Moore's and wasn't loaded, Nenner said. As for the image of the child posing, the lawyer said, "I'm not saying it's in the best taste in the world."
In 1995, an unsolved shooting left Moore with a barely functioning kidney. After that, Nenner said, "he got out of a life of violent crime."
What about his five arrests since 1995? "An arrest is nothing more than an accusation," Nenner said.
Since Moore was shot, Nenner said, he has made a living as a landlord and as a music producer.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert K. Reed, head of the federal program here, called Moore's arrest sheet "frightening."
"We have to ask, 'Why is this person constantly getting in trouble with the law?' " Reed said. "He may be the unluckiest person in the world, but generally that is not the case."
•
It all began with a handshake.
In 1998, NRA president Heston joined up with Rendell, now Pennsylvania governor but then a mayor seeking modest gun-control measures, to urge that Philadelphia become the first big city to aggressively enforce existing federal gun laws.
The two men were picking up on an existing program in Richmond, Va., one-eighth the size of Philadelphia, that had received much favorable press.
Since the Philadelphia program was founded, the number of gun crimes in the city generally has fallen.
Mayor Street has cited his Safe Streets program, under which police last year swarmed drug corners, as one reason for the change. Prosecutor Reed said the federal crackdown, too, had helped.
"I'm not surprised that the numbers are coming down," Reed said. "And I think we're part of it."
Criminologists are unsure. While the Philadelphia program has not been subjected to outside study, a recent report on Richmond's concluded that the crime decrease there had only a little to do with the feds.
In a study for the Brookings Institution, two scholars found that cities similar to Richmond saw the same drop in crime - without any antigun program. The authors said a burning-out of crack violence might be among the reasons.
"The Clinton administration and Charlton Heston, the most unlikely allies possible, said we have the crime-fighting equivalent of a cure for cancer," said study coauthor Jens Ludwig, a Georgetown University professor. "What we found is that it was more like aspirin. That's not to say aspirin is bad. But aspirin is aspirin."
While the number of gun crimes is dropping in Philadelphia, the problem remains huge. Each day last year, an average of 19 people were robbed or threatened at gunpoint, or shot.
Statistics aside, prosecutors say the federal initiative has changed criminal behavior.
"We find that drug traffickers are actually setting up their operations so that very few of the dealers on the streets have firearms," said Deputy District Attorney George Mosee, who until recently served as liaison to the program.
In a report last year on the program, federal prosecutors quoted a defendant as overheard on a prison telephone. The inmate warned about carrying "burners" - slang for guns.
"The feds down there... . This is vicious," the man said. "Yo, man, they is not playing with the burners, man. Any of them dudes you know with them burners, you better tell them they better fall back."
•
Rodney Pagan didn't get that message.
He fell into the federal grasp after Philadelphia police chased him down early last year. They arrested him after a man ran up to a patrol car and yelled that Pagan had pulled a gun.
Pagan dumped the .22-caliber gun (with an obliterated serial number) as he ran, but police recovered it. For Pagan, carrying that gun was crime in itself. State and federal laws bar felons from having guns.
"I found this gun, picked it up," an unconvincing Pagan said in federal court. "Didn't think about it. The cop stopped me. I didn't want to be caught. I threw it."
His past convictions included three felonies, one for dealing crack and two burglaries - including the toy-train theft.
Under federal law, three such convictions meant Pagan could be treated as an "armed career criminal" facing a mandatory 15 years. This statute is one of the toughest provisions of Operation Safe Neighborhoods.
"Certainly, you will have some people whose records will suggest they should be given as much time as you can give them," said Kenneth Edelin, the assistant federal defender who represented Pagan. "Mr. Pagan is certainly not that person."
But the feds have no sympathy for a sob story about a model train stolen before a holiday. Before they got their hands on Pagan, they point out, he had been arrested nine times. Pagan, now 31, had beaten burglary, robbery and carjacking charges.
"This is the type of person who presents himself as a one-man crime wave, though we cannot catch him every time," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Bea L. Witzleben, who prosecuted Pagan. "He's had his three strikes and now he needs to be taken out of the community for a sizable period of time."
•
For some prosecutors and judges, Safe Neighborhoods' gun cases have been a comedown from, say, headline-making corruption or fraud trials.
At one time, said Reed, "There was no way federal prosecutors and judges would handle this stuff. It was too small, too nothing, too insignificant.
"There was a mindset in my office - it was not a plum to work on a firearms case. They wanted to work on a big fraud case. That has really changed now."
In 1999, a chief judge in Richmond complained that his federal district had been "transformed into a minor-grade police court."
Some judges have more serious qualms. They say the program is a step toward a federal police force. Criticism has also been leveled by some legal scholars, along with some lesser-known gun-rights groups.
In 2001, U.S. District Judge Stewart Dalzell in Philadelphia affirmed a guilty verdict for a man with a past robbery conviction who had been caught with a 9mm handgun, but did so unhappily. He urged an appellate court to overturn the conviction, saying the felon had "committed no federal crime."
•
In Philadelphia, Safe Neighborhoods is headed by Reed, 48, a button-down prosecutor with a track record in fighting street crime. "You try to take off the worst of the worst," Reed said. "There are people alive today and people who have not been victimized because these people are doing years in jail."
Reed directs about 30 prosecutors and other staff in the U.S. Attorney's Office here, newly assisted by 20 local prosecutors from elsewhere in eastern Pennsylvania. Under new orders from Ashcroft, Safe Neighborhoods expanded last year to eight counties outside Philadelphia, including Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery.
Federal prosecutors in New Jersey brought 73 cases statewide last year, about a third of them in Camden County.
To prevail in court, prosecutors need only show that a felon had a gun and previous felony convictions. With the cases so simple, guilty pleas seem to come easily.
In a war of anecdotes, defense lawyers and prosecutors have squared off over whether the program nabs the worst of the worst.
Public defender Rossman Thompson stood by last fall as his client, Ernest Soda Jr., pleaded guilty to illegally possessing a handgun. Thompson knew Soda was looking at 15 years.
At 44, Soda was shuttled into federal court after his arrest last March - for shoplifting.
A diagnosed schizophrenic who at times has heard voices, Soda was acting strangely when police arrived. They took him to a hospital, where he asked to go to the men's room. Police said they kept watch - and saw a loaded .22 fall from his pants.
Soda's past crimes qualified him for federal prosecution. In 1992, he'd grabbed an elderly woman's purse and slammed her head against a steering wheel. That same year, he tried to rob a La Salle University student, saying he had a gun.
His first strike was a break-in, 15 years ago. Police caught him in a drugstore, trying to jimmy cash registers, 11 cents and half a ripped $10 bill in his pockets.
"It is really a sad case," said his attorney, Thompson. "You have an individual with some mental-health problems who was involved in shoplifting. My personal belief is that for possession of a firearm, 15 years is just incredibly ridiculous. It's disproportionate to the offense."
Rummaging through his files, prosecutor Reed cites an outrage of his own - the business dealings of Sylvester Kitchen, 37, of North Philadelphia, who traveled from gun shop to gun shop in 2001, buying 18 cheap handguns that he later sold on the street at a 100 percent profit. Kitchen was convicted of this last year.
Two of the guns he sold have been recovered. One was fired by a man angry over a fender-bender. The shots wounded Julio Muniz Jr. in the stomach and legs, leaving him disabled, with a metal rod in his right leg.
Muniz welcomes the five-year federal sentence given the gun supplier.
"I was an auto mechanic," said Muniz, 32, and father of six children. "In essence, I am now just unemployed because my leg bothers me so much. Towards the end of the day, I can't move because of the pain."
The other recovered gun?
It was found inside a child's bookbag at a Philadelphia elementary school.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
