A federal judge in Brunswick on Thursday sentenced a Broxton man to a 15-year prison term for possessing an assault rifle as a convicted felon.

U.S. District Judge Lisa Godbey Wood passed sentence on Alex Bennett, 32, for stealing an SKS semi-automatic rifle with a 20-round magazine, federal prosecutors in the Southern District of Georgia said. Bennett had three prior felony convictions for drug offenses and robberies and had been classified as “an armed career criminal” under federal statute. As such, he faced a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years, prosecutors said.

Bennett entered a guilty plea last July.

Edward Tarver, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Georgia, said his office “will be relentless in its enforcement of federal firearms laws…. Felons who possess firearms can expect to be returned to prison.”

A man who used handcuffs trying to get a date with his co-worker at the Ringgold Taco Bell has been sentenced to 10 years by Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit Judge Ralph Van Pelt, reports the CatWalkChatt.com, the website for the Catoosa County News and the Walker County Messenger.

Jason Earl Dean, 25, of Dalton, made national headlines in August 2011 after he handcuffed himself to an 18-year-old woman, a co-worker at the local fast food restaurant in an attempt to convince her to go on a date with him, the website reported. She was approaching her car at the end of her shift when he cuffed her. Other co-workers came to her aid and called 911 after hearing her screams. He let her go and fled. She told police he’d been making advances and asking for dates for a month. He was later picked up by the Dalton State College police and returned to Ringgold to face a false imprisonment charge.

The story quoted Lookout Mountain Circuit Assistant District Attorney Alan Norton saying the defendant took a “blind plea,” meaning he plead guilty without having a plea agreement and without knowing the penalty under the law. The ADA said the defendant would serve four years in prison and six years on probation, conditional upon his not having any contact with the woman or her family.

A federal judge in Gainesville has sentenced a former White County sheriff’s deputy to serve 15 years in prison for producing child pornography.

U.S. District Senior Judge William O’Kelley of the Northern District of Georgia sentenced former deputy Christopher Davis,34, of Dahlonega today following Davis’s guilty plea in September for taking photographs of a 7-year-old girl engaged in what federal prosecutors described as “sexually explicit conduct.”

Prosecutors said the photos of the child were taken inside Davis’s home at a time when he was employed as a White County sheriff’s deputy. The photography sessions took place during May and June of 2009, prosecutors said.

Davis was arrested by federal agents in August 2011 as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative by the U.S. Justice Department to combat the sexual exploitation and abuse of children.

According to the federal complaint, homeland security agents in Los Angeles monitoring the Internet for violations of federal child exploitations statutes discovered a publicly accessible website that offered links to a number of adult pornography websites and included chat features.  While monitoring that site, agents discovered several nude photos of the child in sexually explicit poses.

The discovery of the photos led agents to a Texas man and his girlfriend — who subsequently identified the child as the biological daughter of her former husband, Christopher Davis.

The woman, Lisa Davis, denied knowing about the pornographic photos but told federal agents that while she was married to Davis, that her ex-husband often took photos and videos of his daughter, especially at bath time or when she changed clothes, according to the federal complaint. Lisa Davis also told agents that her ex-husband had a large pornography collection that included sexually explicit photos of prepubescent girls.

She said that when she left Davis in 2009, she took with her a computer hard drive belonging to him that she believed contained pictures and videos of her, according to the complaint. That hard drive, which agents seized, contained thousands of pornographic images, the complaint stated.  Her ex-husband and her boyfriend, she told federal agents, were “very close friends.”

Federal agents subsequently confronted Christopher Davis, who admitted that he had taken the photographs in question, according to the federal complaint.

“The defendant violated the trust of a young girl and his community,” said U.S. Attorney Sally Yates of in announcing White’s sentence.

Said Brock Nicholson, special agent in charge of U.S. Department of Homeland Security investigations in Atlanta:

As egregious as this crime is, it’s even more disappointing considering an officer sworn to uphold the law and protect the innocent has engaged in this despicable behavior. We are a witness to an epidemic of the sexual exploitation of children across all sectors of our society. It is imperative that we take every step possible to stop this horrific abuse and ensure these predators will never again have access to a child.

A federal judge in Atlanta has sentenced the owner of Atlanta-based Salwa Foods  to serve a year and a day in federal prison for wire fraud in connection with his submission of more than $300,000 in false claims to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

U.S. District Court Amy Totenberg also ordered Mushtaq “Mike” Mistry, 47, of Lawrenceville  to pay $342,500 in restitution to the U.S. Commodity Credit  Corp.

Mistry and his wife, Waheeda Bano Mistry, were charged last January in an indictment that accused them of devising a scheme to defraud the Agriculture Department’s Market Access Program. The Market Access Program uses funds from the federal Commodity Credit Corp. to assist in the development, expansion and maintenance of agricultural markets for U.S. agricultural commodities and products, according to the indictment.  The program helped U.S. producers and U.S. companies by providing funds to promote U.S. products abroad. The program reimbursed as much as 50 percent of the costs of marketing U.S. products overseas.

Salwa Foods specializes in the production of halal frozen chicken and beef products. Halal refers to meat that has been butchered according to Islamic law.

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It’s taken Bibb County’s district attorney and sheriff’s department six years of investigation and negotiations with the defense team to get Damon Jolly convicted for the killing of deputy Joseph Whitehead Jr., shot during a middle of the night raid on a Macon drug den – sparking an ongoing controversy about no-knock warrants. The long, sad story is told in a gripping account by Joe Kovac Jr. in today’s Macon Telegraph.

The killer cried, sobbed, said he didn’t mean to do it and swore he thought he was defending himself and his drug addled friends from a break-in by a gang when he fired his 32-round “machine pistol” in the dark when the police burst in. He asked for forgiveness from the family of the officer he killed.

The slain officer’s best friend and the sister spoke after the defendant at the sentencing and were unmoved by the killer’s plea deal that gave him a life sentence instead of  risking a death penalty upon trial. The friend called the life sentence “the easy way out.” The sister said, “You deserved to die.”

But District Attorney Greg Winters told the Telegraph he would never have agreed to the deal if he didn’t think it was the best conclusion for everyone. And it saved the officer’s widow and children the pain of a trial. Here’s the link to the drama.

A disbarred lawyer has been sentenced to 10 years’ probation and one year to serve in the Muscogee County Work Camp after pleading guilty to charges of forgery, identity theft and conversion stemming from legal work he continued to do after his law license was lifted.

Chattahoochee Judicial Circuit Chief Judge John Allen on Wednesday also ordered Elliott Vogt, 37, to pay $1,500 in restitution, according to Vogt’s attorney, Neal Callahan of Columbus’ Waldrep, Mullin & Callahan.

“I tried to tell the judge I didn’t think he needed prison time,” said Callahan, but Allen “ordered that he do every single day.”

The office of Circuit District Attorney Julia Slater had asked that Vogt serve five years, Callahan said.

Vogt, a graduate of the University of Alabama School of Law who joined the Georgia bar in 2005, had a small family law practice across the Chattahoochee River from Columbus in Phenix City, Ala., when he failed to respond to a State Bar of Alabama investigation into a bounced check from his escrow account. His Alabama law license was suspended. The Georgia bar suspended his license here in a reciprocal action, said Callahan, and in June 2010 – after an investigation into complaints from Georgia clients – the Georgia Supreme Court ordered Vogt disbarred.

Vogt continued to represent clients until late 2010, when Chattahoochee Circuit Superior Court Judge Bobby Peters ordered him jailed for 20 days on contempt charges after a hearing in which evidence showed that Vogt had not only continued to represent clients but had forged court documents, seals and judges’ signatures.

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The defendant who represented himself in a Marietta murder trial was sentenced Monday morning to life plus 47 and a half years in prison.

The sentence might have been worse under current law, but the judge had to use the guidelines in place in

1995, the time of the murder of Karmen Smith and the stabbing of her son, Nicholas, then five years old.

Nick Smith, now 22 and a recent graduate of the University of Georgia, was the only witness to speak in the sentencing hearing, which lasted about an hour. Talking through tears, he described the “scared, sad little boy” he was after the stabbing, “branded” by his wounds. “He’s finally caught and I’m finally free. I love you, Mom,” he said.

It was Nick Smith that Cobb County Superior Court Judge Mary Staley talked about first when she sentenced Waseem Daker. Watching his testimony during the three-week trial, Staley said she felt she witnessed the boy grow into a man and “look you in the eye,” she told Daker. She said Smith showed “remarkable enduring strength in that moment.”

Staley gave Daker the maximum sentence recommended by Assistant District Attorney Jesse Evans for the 11-count conviction. Several of the charges were merged together. The sentence includes: life for the first murder count, 20 years for aggravated assault, 20 years for burglary, five years for false imprisonment and 2 and a half years for criminal intent to commit aggravated stalking.

“I hope you never leave prison – ever – because that would be just,” Staley told Daker. The judge agreed with Evans’ assertion that the case has no mitigating facts and that Daker is dangerous. She added, “I think you’re dangerous in prison. I hope they keep a close watch on you.”

Daker maintained his innocence. “I did not kill Karmen Smith. I did not stab Nick Smith. I hope one day the truth will come out because this is not it.”

Daker came to court every day of the trial looking like a lawyer, wearing a suit and tie. For the sentencing, he was dressed in a standard red Cobb County Jail jumpsuit.

Daker refused to sign the five sentencing orders, which the judge noted with each order, adding, “in his cowardly way” each time. The orders were signed by the judge, the prosecutor and Daker’s court appointed defense attorney, Jason Treadaway, who was fired by Daker then ordered by the judge to remain as backup counsel.

The judge also said she was authorizing Cobb County Circuit Public Defender Randy Harris to recover from Daker the costs of his court appointed counsel, “whom you manipulated and abused.” She instructed Treadaway to file Daker’s motion for new trial, and dismissed Daker by telling the sheriff’s deputies surrounding him, “Take him out.”

The son of a former Gwinnett County commissioner and a Hall County businessman “sold the office of a Gwinnett County commissioner to individuals whom they believed to be drug traffickers and tried to become drug traffickers themselves,” U.S. Attorney Sally Yates said today.

Yates made her remarks after John Fanning, 34, of Dacula – the son of former Gwinnett County Commissioner Shirley Lasseter – and Hall County businessman Carl “Skip” Cain, 65, were sentenced in U.S. District Court in Atlanta to four years, nine months in federal prison for public corruption and drug trafficking offenses.

The two men pleaded guilty earlier this year to participating in a t scheme to sell Lasseter’s vote on a proposed real estate project that required zoning approval by the county commission and for conspiring to traffic in cocaine.

Today’s sentence was handed down by U.S. District Judge Charles Pannell, who sentenced Lasseter on Sept. 5 to serve 33 months in prison for her role in the bribery scheme, federal prosecutors said.

Yates said that the defendants “showed a shocking indifference to prior law enforcement efforts to root out corruption in Gwinnett County and the dangers to the community posed by the illegal drug trade.

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A federal judge in Atlanta has sentenced the former president of the FirstCity Bank of Stockbridge to 12 years in prison for his role in a multi-million-dollar conspiracy that contributed to the bank’s collapse, the U.S. attorney of the Northern District of Georgia announced today.

U.S. District Judge Steve Jones also banned former bank president Mark Conner from the banking industry for life and ordered him to pay $19.5 million in restitution to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. which took control of the bank when it collapsed March 2009, according to U.S. Attorney Sally Quillian Yates and court documents associated with Conner’s prosecution.  Conner also civilly forfeited $1.7 million in cash and interests in multiple properties in Georgia and Virginia collectively worth more than $5 million, federal prosecutors said.

“Our state, which leads the nation in bank failures, is still recovering from a banking crisis of epic proportions,” Yates said after Conner was sentenced. “These failures have a ripple effect in every workplace and household in the state. This sentence should serve as a warning that regardless of your position or the complexity of your scheme, bank officers and directors who place FDIC-insured funds at risk through fraud and self-dealing will be brought to justice.”

Last October, Conner pleaded guilty to a charge that he had conspired with the bank’s former attorney and a former loan officer to  routinely mislead federal and state bank regulators to conceal a scheme in which he reaped more than $7 million, federal prosecutors said.

According to Christy Romero, acting special inspector general for the federal Troubled Asset Relief Program, Conner – beginning in 2004 – directed the bank to make loans to buy land that he owned and caused the bank to fund draws on construction and development loans from which he personally benefited. “As the real estate market declined,” Romero said, “Conner schemed to take foreclosed properties off the bank’s books through sales to straw purchasers, concealing that the bank funded the purchases.”

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<strong></strong>The Columbus Ledger- Enquirer reports that today that a robbery attempt that cost the victim a testicle – and the ability to father children – has resulted in a sentence of seven years in prison and eight years on probation.

The punishment was not enough to satisfy the prosecutor, who had asked for 10 years behind bars for Anthony Tatum, 22, who admitted his role in the robbery attempt and was sentenced in Muscogee County Superior Court Monday, the Ledger-Enquirer reported.

The paper reported the victim testified that Tatum, whom he knew, knocked on his door and asked to use the phone. When the door opened, two other men – still at large – jumped out of the bushes and attempted to rob him. The victim grabbed a hammer to knock the gun out of the perpetrator’s hand. It fired, hitting him in the testicle. The would-be robbers ran away, but police caught Tatum because the victim identified him.

Here’s the link:<a href=”http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/2012/08/08/2153755/victim-loses-testicle-in-robbery.html”> http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/2012/08/08/2153755/victim-loses-testicle-in-robbery.html</a>