{"id":52883,"date":"2014-07-02T10:15:14","date_gmt":"2014-07-02T14:15:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=52883"},"modified":"2014-07-02T10:06:59","modified_gmt":"2014-07-02T14:06:59","slug":"charles-allen-chavous-stolen-valor-in-the-courtroom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=52883","title":{"rendered":"Charles Allen Chavous; Stolen Valor in the courtroom"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><center><a href=\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?attachment_id=42260\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-42260\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/Charles-Allen-Chavous-mugshot-200x300.jpg\" alt=\"Charles Allen Chavous mugshot\" width=\"200\" height=\"300\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-42260\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/Charles-Allen-Chavous-mugshot-200x300.jpg 200w, https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/Charles-Allen-Chavous-mugshot-222x333.jpg 222w, https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/Charles-Allen-Chavous-mugshot.jpg 319w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px\" \/><\/a><\/center><\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ve written about Charles Allen Chavous in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=48212\">May<\/a> and <a href=\"valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=52585\">June<\/a> this year. He used his phony POW and war hero stories to avoid a long prison sentence for his participation in a murder back in 1974 &#8211; he was sentenced to five years of probation and a $1000 fine. Chief Tango and TSO send us a link to an article in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.stripes.com\/former-marine-uses-bogus-as-hell-service-record-walks-away-free-man-1.291449\">Stars &#038; Stripes<\/a> in which Jon Harper drills a little deeper into the story;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p> Judge Michael Annis of the Richmond County, Ga., Superior Court, did not respond to queries about whether Chavous\u2019 purported service record played any role in his sentencing decision, handed down in April.<\/p>\n<p>Assistant District Attorney John Markwalter said he did not recommend any particular sentence as part of the plea agreement. Markwalter said the punishment was left to the discretion of the court, and he would not speculate as to why Annis chose not to give the man any prison time.<\/p>\n<p>Kay Levine, a professor at Emory University Law School in Atlanta who specializes in criminal law, said that a defendant\u2019s history often plays a big role in sentencing, especially their criminal history.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>But Levine said Connell\u2019s portrayal of his client as a war hero could have been a major factor in him avoiding prison.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe war hero story, I think, would function pretty heavily in this calculation of what\u2019s his just dessert,\u201d Levine said. \u201cThere are all of these things that [suggest that] the past is this record of heroism, and also tragedy \u2026 to the extent that he was injured in Vietnam fighting for the country. &#8230; That factors into how much punishment does he deserve now, because it kind of serves as a counterweight to the wrongdoing of the crime. Somebody who doesn\u2019t have that, there is no counterweight.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>We posted Chavous&#8217; DD214 in May. It was riddled with blatant forgery, as cited by our buddy Doug Sterner in the S&#038;S article;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n    Parts of Block 24 (Awards) and Block 25 (Education and Training) clearly are in a different font than the rest of the DD-214.<br \/>\n    The word \u201cGallantry\u201d is misspelled \u201cGallentry\u201d in Block 25.<br \/>\n    The \u201cNavy Cross Medal\u201d and the \u201cSilver Star Medal\u201d \u2014 as they appear in the document \u2014 are referred to simply as \u201cNavy Cross\u201d and \u201cSilver Star,\u201d without the word \u201cMedal\u201d appearing after them.<br \/>\n    Block 30 (Remarks) states that Chavous served in Vietnam 30 Jan 1970-1 December 1970 and then again from 15 Jan 1971-6 July 1971. But the font listing the second tour is different from the text above it, which indicates it came from a different typewriter.<br \/>\n    Block 30 (Remarks) states that Chavous was \u201c(Missing in Action) November 21-24, 1970,\u201d but the (month\/day\/year) date format is different from the date format used just above it, and it is not the proper (date\/month\/year) format used by the military. This suggests the \u201cMissing in Action\u201d part was added later by someone else.<br \/>\n    In Block 5a &#038; 6 (Rank), his rank is shown as \u201cSgt.\u201d with a date of rank of Jan. 3, 1970, but the \u201cg\u201d in \u201cSgt\u201d is in a different font than the \u201cg\u201d in \u201cAugusta,\u201d which indicates that \u201cSgt\u201d was written with a different typewriter.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThat DD-214 is BOGUS AS HELL,\u201d Sterner said in an email.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Here is the forged DD214 for your edification;<\/p>\n<p><center><a href=\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?attachment_id=48215\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-48215\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/Charles-Chavous-forgery-235x300.jpg\" alt=\"Charles Chavous forgery\" width=\"235\" height=\"300\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-48215\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/Charles-Chavous-forgery-235x300.jpg 235w, https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/Charles-Chavous-forgery-260x333.jpg 260w, https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/Charles-Chavous-forgery.jpg 445w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 235px) 100vw, 235px\" \/><\/a><\/center><\/p>\n<p>OK, so the judge won&#8217;t answer whether the forgery played a part in the sentencing and the prosecutor won&#8217;t take the blame, but I don&#8217;t see either of them bringing charges that Chavous brought a forged government document into the court and presented it as mitigation for his role in the murder. I mean, if I was an officer of the court, I&#8217;d want to send a message to the thousands of criminals out there who would seek to influence the court with phony documentation. But, I guess that&#8217;s just me.<\/p>\n<p>TSO communicated with Chavous&#8217; lawyer and <a href=\"http:\/\/burnpit.us\/2014\/07\/how-murderer-used-stolen-valor-spring-himself-jail\">some guy named Mothax wrote about it<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We&#8217;ve written about Charles Allen Chavous in May and June this year. He used his phony &hellip; <a title=\"Charles Allen Chavous; Stolen Valor in the courtroom\" class=\"hm-read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=52883\"><span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Charles Allen Chavous; Stolen Valor in the courtroom<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":42260,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-52883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-legal","category-phony-soldiers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=52883"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52883\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/42260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}