The ones that get away

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PHILADELPHIA — For a man on the run from charges that he sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl, Thomas Terlecky has surprisingly little to fear from the law. The police here know exactly where to find him, but they will not go get him.

Terlecky got away by catching a Greyhound bus to Miami.

The police in his new hometown know that Terlecky is a fugitive, and they have tried repeatedly to return him to Philadelphia — both before and after he was convicted of having sex with two other underage girls in Florida. As recently as November, police handcuffed Terlecky and called Philadelphia authorities to tell them their fugitive had been found.

But just like every time before, the authorities in Philadelphia refused to take him back.

Across the United States, police and prosecutors are allowing tens of thousands of wanted felons — including more than 3,300 people accused of sexual assaults, robberies and homicides — to escape justice merely by crossing a state border, a USA TODAY investigation found. Those decisions, almost always made in secret, permit fugitives to go free in communities across the country, leaving their crimes unpunished, their victims outraged and the public at risk.

Each fugitive’s case is chronicled in a confidential FBI database that police use to track outstanding warrants. In 186,873 of those cases, police indicated that they would not spend the time or money to retrieve the fugitive from another state, a process known as extradition. That’s true even if the fugitives are just across a bridge in the state next door. Another 78,878 felony suspects won’t be extradited from anyplace but neighboring states.

Few places are immune. Police in Philadelphia, Atlanta and Little Rock — all among the nation’s highest-crime cities — told the FBI they wouldn’t pursue 90% or more of their felony suspects into other states. Los Angeles police said they would not extradite 77 people for murder or attempted murder, 141 for robbery and 84 for sexual assault.

The FBI refuses to say who or where those fugitives are. But USA TODAY identified thousands of them using records and databases from courts and law enforcement agencies. Among the fugitives police said they would not pursue: a man accused in Collier County, Fla., of hacking his roommate’s neck with a machete during a fight over two cans of beer; a man charged with drawing a gun on a Newport News, Va., store manager during a robbery, and even one of the men Pittsburgh identified as among its “most wanted” fugitives.

Such fugitives should be among the easiest targets in the nation’s fragmented justice system. The police typically don’t hunt them; instead, they wait for officers to come across them again, during traffic stops or when they’re arrested on new charges.

More often than not, the suspects are found locked up in another city’s jail.

But if that jail happens to be in a different state, local law-enforcement officials regularly refuse to get them because they don’t want to pay the cost or jump through the legal hoops required to extradite them. That process can be either swift or surreal: In many cases, it costs no more than a few hundred dollars, but it can also require months of paperwork and the signature of both states’ governors.

The police let them get away instead.

Even Terlecky, wanted in Philadelphia for a first-degree felony, was surprised. “Why would they not extradite on a felony warrant?” he said in an interview. His only guess: “This wasn’t a case where I forcefully grabbed the kid. That’s the only reason I’m thinking why they won’t push to bring me back.”

Thomas Terlecky talks about the charges he’s facing, why he fled Philadelphia, and why officials there won’t take him back.Brad Heath, Jennifer Harnish, Shannon Rae Green, Steve Elfers

Terlecky said that in the 17 years he has been a fugitive, he has lost count of how many times Florida police threw him in jail in hopes of returning him to Pennsylvania. But the arrests all end the same way. In November, Miami-Dade police detained him after he was pulled over for an obscured license plate. A few hours later, Philadelphia officials “asked that (he) be released” because they were unwilling to travel beyond Pennsylvania’s neighboring states to get him, according to police records. An officer drove him home.

Terlecky is wanted on charges that he had what prosecutors called “consensual” sex with a 14-year-old girl in a downtown Philadelphia hotel in 1996, a felony because of her age. He was convicted of having sex with two other girls in Florida — one 14, the other 15 — in the years that followed and is now a registered sex offender. Terlecky said in interviews that he is innocent of the Philadelphia charges, that he fled because he was afraid of being locked up awaiting a trial, and that he would gladly go back if he could be assured that he would not spend time in jail.

Prosecutors said they didn’t chase Terlecky because the woman he is accused of assaulting was uncooperative.

“That’s not true,” the woman said when USA TODAY contacted her this year. She asked not to be identified to protect her privacy.

Her father took her to court on her 15th birthday to testify against Terlecky at a preliminary hearing. “We walked out of there with our heads held high thinking he’s going to jail for what he did to me,” she said. It was the last she heard of the case; she assumed Terlecky was in prison.

Pennsylvania’s Victim Advocate, Jennifer Storm, said victims need to be informed whenever officials choose to let a defendant get away. “It is alarming that there are victims who are further harmed by denying them the opportunity for justice, restitution and safety,” she said.

The woman Terlecky is charged with assaulting said no one told her that he fled Philadelphia or that prosecutors there had decided not to pursue him as long as he stayed in Florida, where he started a general contracting business that he said counts police officers among its customers.

“He got away with it,” she said when she found out. “That makes me sick to my stomach. It’s disgraceful.”

via – www.usatoday.com

Cops can Execute a Warrant in the Middle of the Night in a Public Park

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State v. Williams (ICA September 22, 2014)
Background. Fred Williams was in Cartwright Park in Honolulu after closing time. The signs around the park posted that no one can be there between the hours of 10:00 p.m. and 5:00 a.m. The police found him and cited him for being in the park during the off-hours. In the process, they discovered that an outstanding bench warrant (a judge ordered a warrant for his arrest for failing to show up to court on an unrelated matter) was out for him. He was subsequently arrested for that. After being placed in handcuffs, the police discovered a glass pipe, two lighters, and small baggies on his person. This discovery led to prosecuting him for possession of drugs and drug paraphernalia. The warrant, however, expressly and explicitly stated that it could not be executed between the hours of 10:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m. “on premises not open to the public.”
Williams moved to suppress on the grounds that the warrant was improperly executed. The circuit court granted the motion. The prosecution appealed.
The Limits of Executing Warrants. Warrants shall “contain a prohibition against execution of the warrant between 10:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m. on premises not open to the public, unless a judge of the district or circuit court permits execution during those hours in writing on the warrant[.]” Hawaii Rules of Penal Procedure (HRPP) Rule 9(b). The Williams warrant contained this prohibition. And yet the warrant was executed on a premises that was “not open to the public”—Cartwright Park after dark.
Court rules are interpreted like statutes. Molinar v. Schweizer, 95 Hawaii 331, 334-35, 22 P.3d 978, 981-82 (2001). When “the terms of a statute are plain, unambiguous and explicit, we are not liberty to look beyond that language for a different meaning.” State v. Haugen, 104 Hawaii 71, 75, 85 P.3d 178, 182 (2004). But this isn’t always the case. According to the ICA, when a literal construction leads to “an absurd and unjust result,” id., the court can resort to the legislative history to discern the intent behind the language.
“Not Open to the Public” Means Private and Places that the Public can go to. The ICA zeroed in on the part of the rule that forbid the police from executing warrants in places at night that were “not open to the public.” The Judicial Council of Hawaii’s Committee on Revision of the Rules of Criminal Procedure came up with these words in the 1970s. Back then, the drafters used the words “not open to the public” instead of “private” in order to avoid the technical and difficult questions related to title.
The ICA agreed with the prosecution that a literal reading of the prohibition lead to an absurd and illogical result. It concluded that limiting the execution of warrants “on public property only to those hours the property is technically ‘open’ is to make the exception a nullity.”
No Need to Fear Nighttime Warrant Executions Here. Warrants are normally not allowed to be executed at night because there is a “greater expectation of privacy that individuals possess in their homes at night” and a nighttime search creates a “heightened safety risk since people may tend to overreact to an entry by force in the dead of night[.]” State v. Richardson, 80 Hawaii 1, 7, 904 P.2d 886, 892 (1995). This concern, according to the ICA, is absent when the warrant is executed on public property.
And so the ICA vacated the suppression order and remanded the case back to the circuit court for further proceedings.
Rule 9 and the Homeless Hypothetical. The ICA appears to have held Rule 9’s “prohibition against execution of the warrant between 10:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m. on premises not open to the public” does not prohibit the police from executing a warrant in a public park during off-hours. The details surrounding Williams and Cartwright Park in this opinion are few and far between. Perhaps Williams was standing around and the police approached him for being in the park after dark. That seems to fit well with the ICA’s interpretation of Rule 9.
But what if this wasn’t Cartwright Park? What if this was Aala Park and what if Williams was living in a tent? Or even under a shopping cart? Would the “greater expectation of privacy” still be absent? According to the ICA, the answer seems to be yes. The ICA held as a matter of law that the police may execute a warrant in the middle of the night so long as the person is on public property—even if you’re in a tent on that public property. That strongly suggests that the homeless do not have an expectation of privacy. Now, we will have to wait for such a case to come before the appellate courts to determine that much more difficult question.