BELFAST, Maine — A man who was part of a Waldo County burglary ring active in 2010 and 2011 was sentenced last week to a jail term and the payment of $14,469 in joint restitution along with another member of the ring.
Patrick R. Bickford, 24, of Brooks will spend five years in county jail with all but nine months suspended after being sentenced on Thursday at Waldo County Superior Court. He had pleaded guilty to 23 counts of burglary, theft, criminal mischief and aggravated criminal mischief, with three additional counts dismissed.
He was arrested in February 2011 after a crime spree that police described as a “free-for-all.” Bickford and the other men ultimately arrested for the burglaries apparently had entered vacant houses to cut copper piping out of the basements and in other instances would back a pulp loader truck to a broken-down vehicle, take it and sell it for scrap metal.
Police described Billy Joe Hall, 25, of Brooks as the hub of the series of burglaries. Hall was sentenced in October to eight years in prison with all but two years and six months suspended on a total of 39 counts of burglary, theft, criminal mischief and aggravated criminal mischief. He also was required to pay $25,411 in restitution.
Bickford was ordered to pay restitution jointly with Hall, according to the judgment filed at Waldo County Superior Court.
Among other items, the men stole an antique skeet shooter, copper piping, electric wiring, firearms, boat motors, 10 chain saws and a 1989 Ford pickup truck.
Bickford’s father, Smith Bickford Jr., 49, of Jackson, also was a member of the burglary ring, according to police. He was sentenced in October to two years of prison with all but 90 days suspended on several counts of burglary of a motor vehicle and theft. He also was required to pay $7,118 in restitution.
Billy Hall – 39 counts of burglery and only 2 years 6 months. Bickford gets 9 months…both will be back out and doing it again soon.
When will this state figure out that no punishment equals more crime? There is no deterant to crime unless there IS a deterant to crime. Nine months? Let’s all be criminals. Maine, the way life should be? Count me out. If anyone can’t figure out that allowing criminals to go soft on time served is simply encouraging them to commit more crimes and the flipside is the excuse of overcrowding in jails. I’ll pay to keep them locked up. Count me in. The rest makes no sense.
Well said. Ridiculously low bails and no real punishment for crimes committed…..gee whiz, I wonder why there’s such a high rate of recidivism?
what in the world is up with that Brooks area?
I blame Bush.
I blame the BDN. They only cover CRIME in Waldo County. They covered not a single town meeting, don’t report on anything POSITIVE and half the time their facts are screwed up anyway.
Boy O Boy, Maine is the state for “If you can’t do the time come here and do the crime”.
Tainting Evidence
Inside the Scandals at the FBI Crime Lab
By JOHN F. KELLY and PHILLIP K. WEARNE
The Free Press
see link for full story
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/k/kelly-evidence.html
Prologue: Examining the Examiners
The tall, graying legislator strode past the American flag onto the platform of Committee Room 226. With a quick adjustment of his black-and-white spotted tie, he seated himself at the center of a semicircular dais under the carved eagle on the hardwood-paneled wall. As the lights of six television cameras were switched on and photographers and cameramen began to jostle for position, Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa began to read slowly from three sheets of paper. It was his opening statement as chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight into the Courts at hearings entitled, “A Review of the FBI Laboratory: Beyond the Inspector General’s Report.”
His purpose, he explained, was to help restore public confidence in federal law enforcement in general and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in particular. But the facts the senator went on to outline hardly seemed likely to do that. The hearings had had to be postponed twice, he stated, because of the FBI’s refusal to cooperate by supplying requested documentation and by making FBI employees available to testify without the bureau’s lawyers present. This, Senator Grassley said, was despite FBI director Louis Freeh’s appeal for more oversight to another congressional subcommittee just four months earlier, when he had stated that the FBI could be the most dangerous agency in the country if “not scrutinized carefully.”
Senator Grassley said the FBI was being hypocritical. “It is not the message that rings true. It’s the actions. The Bureau’s actions contradict the director’s assertion that it is inviting oversight. And until the actions match the words, the ghosts of FBI past are still very much in the present.” He went on to say that he expected the requested documentation to arrive the moment the hearings finished. In fact, within an hour, Senator Grassley had to apologize to the packed committee room for being “so cynical.” The documents had arrived but were so heavily redacted as to be virtually useless, he said, holding up page after page of blacked-out FBI memos.
Senator Grassley’s hearings took place in the wake of the release five months earlier of a damning 517-page report by the Inspector General’s Office of the Department of Justice, the result of an eighteen-month investigation into the FBI laboratory. The investigators had included a panel of five internationally renowned forensic scientists, the first time in its sixty-five-year history that the FBI lab, considered by many — not least, by itself — the best in the world, had been subject to any form of external scientific scrutiny. The findings were alarming. FBI examiners had given scientifically flawed, inaccurate, and overstated testimony under oath in court; had altered the lab reports of examiners to give them a pro-prosecutorial slant, and had failed to document tests and examinations from which they drew incriminating conclusions, thus ensuring that their work could never be properly checked.
FBI lab management, meanwhile, had failed to check examinations and lab reports; had overseen a woefully inadequate record retention system; and had not only failed to investigate serious and credible allegations of incompetence but had covered them up. Management had also resisted any form of external scrutiny of the lab and had failed to establish and enforce its own validated scientific procedures and protocols — the same ones that had been issued by managers themselves in an effort to combat the lab’s known shortcomings in the first place.
But the IG’s report, shocking as its conclusions were, was severely limited. It had looked at just three of seven units in the FBI lab’s Scientific Analysis Section, a fraction of the lab’s total of twenty-seven units.* The IG had been mandated to look into the specific allegations of just one man, Dr. Frederic Whitehurst, a Ph.D. chemist and FBI supervisory special agent who for eight years, until 1994, had worked solely on explosives-residue analysis — trace detection, and identification of the residue left behind by explosions in the lab’s Materials Analysis Unit.
Another family business gone bad….
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Do they keep people in County Jails for more than a year? Just wondering whether the rules had been changed.
Bickford’s father, Smith Bickford Jr is dead !!!wow BDN can you get anything right .
I was thinking like father, like son but apparently not? Another relative?
Jr Bickford just passed away in March…Before he passed away he was in court and had that sentence and fine set in place. I don’t see how BDN reported anything wrong? Other than not mentioning that he has since passed away?
He’s a nice boy, just misunderstood.
what is Wrong ??? with this ??? These Guys are Not 1st timers,they are full timers,I moved from that area Just because of people think its alright to do this,for a living,I lost THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS worth of stuff that I had worked all my life to get,they act like kids until they see what you have,then they come in while you are gone.if the Law did a little bit of Research, they would put 1/2 of the people of Waldo CO, in Jail. I lived in Maine 60 plus years,had never seen so much LOW LIFE…..
I wonder ? if these Partners of Smith Bickfords Gave him a Decent Funeral,or did they just say Oh, Well
Someone at the BDN ought to study English. It says above Bickford “will spend five years in jail with all but nine months suspended”. That is incorrect. He will SPEND nine months in jail. You did the same thing in the story when Hall was convicted. After reading it all through, rational person couldn’t tell HOW long these jokers will be off the streets. And if you read your own paper, you’d know that Smith Bickford isn’t going to spend ANY time in jail and isn’t paying ANYONE back because he DIED recently. Newspapers are supposed to INFORM, but yours just confuses.