Opinion ID: 1972080
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The nature and circumstances of the offense.

Text: The trial judge herself recognized the seriousness of appellee's crimes when at the sentencing hearing she said: . . . think about that young kid who was terrified while you were driving him around for an hour and a half, he'll never forget that either. (RR. 56a) . . . it's a serious dreadful thing to take a youngster, and we all saw that kid who testified, and he'll never get over that. He was scared to death, and it's only that he's very bright and resourceful that he managed to escape without physical injury and that he had the intelligence to go and find this defendant and prosecute, but this was an awful experience for a child and it was  it's not a momentary aberration, heat of passion, nothing at all like that. He knew very well that this kid was the newsboy, had money and there was a plan to steal it  to steal the money from a youngster who has no way of defending himself, and I consider it a pretty miserable crime. (RR. 61a, 62a). In addition to what the trial judge had to say about the crime, we would also note that the young victim in this case was forced into the taxi-cab by appellee at the point of a gun. (N.T. August 29, 1984, at 19), and was relieved of his money at the point of a gun. ( Id. at 23). Appellee's sole defense was a general denial and he produced three witnesses: his mother, his brother and a close friend, all of whom testified, as he did, that they were together at the time the young victim was abducted. The trial judge found, as she had the right to do, their testimony to be both improbable and incredible.