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For a crime with a gun, just probation
Tuesday, March 20, 2001
Among all of the teen-agers arrested in the first year of "adult time for adult crime," Dumon H. got the shortest sentence. And it was for one of the most serious crimes.
He and a friend held up the Dollar Bank in Allegheny Center at gunpoint on Sept. 5, 1996. Dumon vaulted over the counter to fill a bag with cash. He and the friend escaped on foot.
A month later, Dumon's hurdling days were over. As he hung out with a group of young men on a corner in Carrick on Oct. 17, he was shot in the back. Two months shy of his 18th birthday, he was paralyzed from the waist down.
Still, when he rolled his black and silver "Action" wheelchair into the courtroom on Dec. 18, 1996, for his preliminary hearing on the bank robbery charge, court staff said his menacing appearance frightened them.
Two months later, Common Pleas Judge Timothy O'Reilly refused to transfer Dumon's bank robbery trial to juvenile court, partly because a reform school could not hold him after he turned 21. "Three years in the juvenile system is not enough," O'Reilly said.
So Dumon stayed in criminal court, where he got a far less stringent penalty: probation for five years.
In a plea bargain, Dumon testified against his fellow bank robber, who received 7 to 32 years in a state penitentiary. In exchange, Dumon was spared time behind bars.
The wheelchair and the threat of prison if he violated probation failed to keep Dumon out of trouble, though.
In November 1999, he was charged with carrying a gun and possession of marijuana. He spent seven months in jail for that.
That sentence was a deal, too, because his probation officer recommended against using the new conviction to revoke his probation and send him to prison.
Five months after Dumon was freed, he was charged again with carrying a gun and with simple assault, terroristic threats and unlawful restraint for an incident in which police say he held a woman at gunpoint to prevent her from leaving his apartment.
Back in the Allegheny County Jail awaiting trial, Dumon is a stark example of the failure of "adult time" to prevent new crime.
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