Florida Criminal Defense Lawyer Blog

A Montana teacher, Stacey Dean Rambold, was charged with three counts of sexual intercourse without consent in 2008. Rambold plead guilty to the rape and he was sentenced in August and released from a Montana prison on probation the next month. The teenage victim, Cherise Morales, took her own life in 2010.

Montana is now fighting to get Rambold back behind bars after he served only 31 days for raping a 14-year-old girl. Prosecutors filed an appeal Friday questioning the controversial 31-day sentence imposed on Rambold.

“The circumstance of a 47-year-old teacher having sexual intercourse with his 14-year-old student is precisely such a circumstance warranting a mandatory minimum sentence,” the appeal document said.

I’m often asked to write about real cases that I’ve handled and/or learned about first hand that provide insight into the criminal justice arena. Here’s one that I remember that sheds light on how random a defendant’s bond can be.

I was involved in a Florida criminal case where the defendant was a trusted bookkeeper for a very successful Miami company. Over the course of a two year period, it was uncovered that she stole money at least once a week. Because every time she stole money from the company the amount was over $300, she was facing felony grand theft charges for every act of theft. That means that she could have been charged with approximately one hundred separate counts of grand theft, each punishable by a maximum penalty of up to five years in prison. Additionally, every count carries with it a separate bond amount. For each count of grand theft in the third degree (amount taken is between $300 and $5000), the bond amount is $5000. That means, assuming she stole on one hundred separate occasions, her bond amount would be $500,000. Also, she’d be facing up to five hundred years in prison.

Fortunately for her, she was charged with one count of organized scheme to defraud. The charge takes all the separate acts of theft together and combines them into one scheme to defraud made up of numerous separate acts of theft. It’s a felony in the first degree, punishable by a statutory maximum sentence of up to thirty years in prison, carrying a standard bond amount of $15,000.

Kalief Browder, a Bronx, N.Y. native, was only 16-years-old when cops unexpectedly showed up and stripped him of his liberty while he was walking home from a party. A person who Browder never met before accused him of robbery. Browder’s nightmare began.

The teen spent the next three years jailed on Rikers Island. Neither he nor his family were able to post the $10,000 bond set in his case. Browder’s attorney said that the whole case hinged exclusively on the word of the alleged victim who was pointing his finger at the teen. Apparently, the alleged victim approached cops two weeks after he was robbed and claimed, “That kid did it.” Based solely on that evidence, cops went into action and arrested Browder.

At one court appearance during his three year ordeal, Browder was threatened by the judge that if he didn’t take the plea offer, he’d receive a 15-year prison sentence after conviction. Not surprisingly, Browder became desperate and suicidal, after multiple court appearances with no resolution in site.