Beware

Thanks to Federal stimulus money, Pennsylvania now has the most sophisticated facial recognition software technology: EVER.

Those with alternate PennDot identities are now being flagged, notified, and prosecuted.  The list of charges includes forgery, tampering with public records, unsworn falsification, and so on.  It seems that for many years, individuals who had driver's license problems created new identities in a variety of manners to obtain alternate driver's licenses, in many instances in names that are similar to their own.  These cases present some challenge for the Commonwealth since there are statute of limitation issues that must be addressed.  The real problem cases are those where the individuals have purchased firearms with the alternate/fake identity.

There is a recent statute that has extended the statute of limitations for these illegal gun purchases.  The same statute  has also created a mandatory minimum five to ten year penalty for second/subsequent offenses.  This means that if someone purchased four guns separately a number of years ago, the Commonwealth has one year from the date of discovery of this unlawful purchase to prosecute.  And the penalty could be three consecutive 5-10 year sentences for these offenses.  These cases get really complicated really fast, but can be successfully defended.

The Commonwealth's burden is to bring in live witnesses to testify to the purchase of the firearms.  Smart defendants keep their mouths shut when approached by State Troopers.  To say anything to Law enforcement would be to incriminate yourself.

See you soon.