The Nation's Pulse
Felons on the Loose
Courts need to put a stop to their revolving door policy.
I intended to write about why workers making $18 an hour (the median wage of the nation’s 107 million full-time wage and salary workers in the third quarter of 2008, according the latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics) should not be expected to give a blank check to automobile companies that drove themselves into a ditch by producing fuel-inefficient vehicles with uncompetitive wage/benefit costs that averaged $73 per hour.
But then the news broke that a young FBI agent has been shot and killed during a 6:00 a.m. drug raid in the outskirts of Pittsburgh. The agent, Samuel Hicks, 33, was part of a task force executing search warrants associated with a drug operation that allegedly distributed powder cocaine and crack cocaine throughout the greater Pittsburgh area.
Hicks, a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, was a former school teacher in Maryland and an officer until February 2007 in the Organized Crime Division of the Baltimore City Police Department. He joined the FBI in March 2007 and was assigned to the Pittsburgh office in August 2007. He leaves behind his wife and a 2-year-old son.
The killing of agent Hicks happened at the residence of Robert and Christina Korbe.
Robert Korbe, 39, a convicted felon, was back on the streets after going through the revolving doors at local courthouses for nearly two decades.
Court records show that Korbe was arrested in September 1991 by Pittsburgh police on drug and weapons charges. After pleading guilty, he was given two years probation.
Arrested again in September 1995 on multiple drug charges, Korbe pleaded guilty and was given three years of probation and five years of probation for the offenses.
In May of this year, police in the Sharpsburg section of Pittsburgh reported that Korbe fought with officers when he was stopped after leaving a fight at Pod’s Landing Bar. Police reported that Korbe was carrying 130 grams of powder cocaine and pills including Cialis, Viagra and Vicodin. Federal sentencing laws require a five-year mandatory minimum jail sentence for possessing or dealing 500 grams of powder cocaine or 5 grams of crack cocaine.
Three months later, on August 6, 2008, Korbe waived a hearing on charges of possession of a controlled substance, possession with intent to deliver, resisting arrest, disorderly conduct, criminal mischief, recklessly endangering another person, and aggravated assault.
Korbe was free on $25,000 bond on the morning when FBI agent Samuel Hicks was killed. He was scheduled for arraignment the next morning.
The local TV news is reporting that Korbe’s mother said that her son had been involved with drugs for years and that she hadn’t seen him in three years because he and his wife got a protection-from-abuse order against her.
Imagine that. A guy is allegedly pushing a poison that’s killing our kids and he calls the cops to protect him from his mother.
The aforementioned poisoning of our kids refers to the fact that deaths from overdoses of illegal drugs outnumber drug-related murders by more than 10-to-1.
In other legal news as a I write, J. J. Gumberg Company, the operator of the upscale Waterworks Mall in the Pittsburgh suburb of Fox Chapel, has agreed to a monetary settlement with a rape victim and her husband who had sued the company because of allegedly inadequate security.
The rape victim and her 16-month-old daughter were kidnapped at knifepoint from the mall’s parking lot by Jimmy Lee Tayse, 29, at 10:30 on the morning of April 7, 2007. The victim testified that Tayse jumped into her back seat after she had loaded groceries into her vehicle and placed her child in a car seat.
About the Author
Ralph R. Reiland is the B. Kenneth Simon professor of free enterprise and an associate professor of economics at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (13) | Leave a comment
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Marc Jeric| 12.2.08 @ 5:44PM
According to the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory our criminals are the victims of the unjust capitalist society and of the churches which dispense the opium for the masses. The teacher union is the main dispenser of such theories to our uneducated and illiterate youngsters. In their thinking there are no born criminals - only the misunderstood victims who should be rehabilitated through socially responsible community services.
Alan Brooks| 12.2.08 @ 8:20PM
Little Red Riding Hood was raped and murdered by the Big bad Wolf, but Johnie Cochran got him off on a technicality and he wrote a book about it.
Alan Brooks| 12.2.08 @ 9:04PM
poor little Big Bad Wolf.
C. S. P. Schofield| 12.3.08 @ 6:06AM
While it is all very well to get bent out of shape over the courts' breezy treatment of Korbe, there is another aspect of this that wants consideration. Hicks died because the authorities pulled a commando-style run-and-gun raid in the middle of the night on a house containing small children and their mother. Hicks was killed, not by the targeted drug dealer, but by the mother of those children; a woman woken from sleep by armed men blowing through the doors of her house in the middle of the night. Furthermore, having shot Hicks, she called 911.
I guess what I am saying here is that we need to make up our flipping minds. Either the "War on Drugs" justifies the tactics that lead the the shooting of Agent Hicks, and the courts are horribly wrong to allow a drug dealer out on bail, or the courts have a point and the person who decided to re-enact The Raid on Entebbe is an imbecile who should be charged with Hicks murder (rather than Mrs. Korbe).
I know what I think; the War on Drugs has struck me for years as a singularly stupid excuse for government sending and intrusiveness. In the Victorian era Marijuana, Cocaine, and Heroin were not against Federal law, and our biggest social problem with drugs was with alcohol abuse. I frankly don't see how billions of Drug War dollars and thousands of paramilitary raids (many with tragically stupid results) has changed matters.
I don't use illegal drugs (yet; I do smoke and that's headed for Prohibition). Most druggies I've known were pathetic losers. Drug dealers are scum. Nevertheless the War on Drugs strikes me as an authentic menace to society, at least as bad as the drugs it fights.
Gazinya| 12.3.08 @ 12:05PM
"The government has decided....." These can be the scariest words ever uttered. When the Feds decided to 'control drugs' it stole from the cities, countys, states the Constitutional duties to regulate behavior. The citizens of each state can and should decide what they want to do with drugs and the distrubution or prohobition of such drugs. The drug dealers make billions to distribute drugs and the Feds spend many more billions to keep the dealers working.
What happens when I die? If I become nothing, like the evolutionist would declare or go out and come back, what is the down side? If I go out and become part of the universe or wander the planet as a ghost, what changes the scheme of things? If I go and their is a judgement of my life, how does that affect those still alive? We keep those who have created a horror for us in our society because some really fear death. I say, if a person in this reality even me, creates true fear to my other and their family then send that person on and let me and mine enjoy this reality. The death penelty should be used not after five or six or even two hienous crimes but swiftly after ONE. I can live with that.
Annoyed citizen| 12.5.08 @ 3:39PM
C. S. P. Schofield - how can you say that this monther is innocent? What respectable woman lives with a dug dealer and exposes her children to that? Hmmm maybe a woman that reaps the rewards of his mega sales.
People like you make me ill. Always looking for the way out for people who are guilty. And you seem to have forgotten the very large detail in which Christina Korbe called 911 AFTER she shot him. Seriously?
You probably believe O.J. Simpson is innocent as well.
Ms. Know| 12.6.08 @ 9:52PM
Yeah, and they're all in Washington, or in the left-wing illuminati administration.
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