Man pleads guilty to stealing former coworker's identity for 30 years | Hacker News Reader

Man pleads guilty to stealing former coworker's identity for 30 years

arstechnica.com

26 pointsbikenaga7 comments

It's a freaky story no doubt but also kind of weird. Forgot about DNA tests - was the victim totally alienated from his family? I could see someone else did X under your name and you can't prove you didn't do it but in this case the victim couldn't prove his own identity.

At least one of his parents was still living - that parent couldn't or wouldn't come to California? Or was impossible to be contacted?

[dupe]

Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39919646

I find it incredibly chilling that a court, wanting to dispose of itself a problematic defendant, decided to get a doctor to declare him incompetent, then order him into a facility and even go so far as to order him to take specific medication.

It's tyrannical even to a genuine defendant, I struggle to imagine how it would have felt to be in this victims place.

the part where they told him he couldn't use his own name any more, and had to use the perpetrator's name instead was just wild. i can barely believe that judges are so incredibly reckless and incompetent!

"This continued until December 2019 when a state public defender told a court that Woods did not have the mental competency to stand trial"

Does that not mean that his own defence was claiming he was nuts?

I'd like to know why the court didn't jump straight to the DNA test.

> Does that not mean that his own defence was claiming he was nuts?

The plea agreement spells this out more carefully. The states public defender doubted his competency. The judge then ordered a report from a doctor and on that basis found he was not mentally competent. He was then ordered to be restored to competency and that order included that he take medication for his "condition."

This was also precisely at the beginning of 2020, so he had to endure all of this set against the madness of the beginning of the COVID pandemic. I'm sure the effort to "restore" his competency didn't suffer for it.

The court, I felt, knew exactly what it was doing, and after having enough of this "treatment" the victim pled "no contest," which magically restored his competency in the eyes of the court, and he was released with time served. The court charged him $400 for the completely unethical dispatch of injustice.

> I'd like to know why the court didn't jump straight to the DNA test.

His defender certainly should have made the same effort the hospitals investigator did. That's what invoked the reaction from me. He was indigent and the court just didn't want anything to do with him other than for him to just sort of "go away."

More importantly, there were enough other inconsistencies in this case that the court should have been inclined to act more carefully. I hope everyone involved has had a chance to think about their role in this and feel bad about it.

> His defender certainly should have made the same effort the hospitals investigator did.

This is by no means an excuse, but public defenders in many jurisdictions are horrifyingly overwhelmed, overcommitted, and their offices chronically understaffed. I read a report a while ago that said something like a public defender basically just has something on the order of a few hours per defendant to work on their case. (I don't remember the exact number of hours, but it sounded woefully inadequate.)

Again, not an excuse. And the judge seems to share culpability here too. But I can unfortunately see how something like this would happen.

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