40 years sounds like an awful brutal sentence hanging over this man's head.<p>Then again, the accusation is that he forged documents and emails, and deleted others, as part of a lawsuit. That seems pretty bad.<p>But 40 years literally takes someone's life away. The crime was nonviolent. Maybe 10 years in jail would be a harsh enough penalty? That's pretty life-changing. I suppose it's up to the judge, maybe if he wasn't using crazy methods to flee from bail he wouldn't end up with the max penalty. Seems like he's screwed now.<p>This whole thing makes me uncomfortable.
I work in the correction industry with devices like this one. Most devices don't have accelerometers in them so so the "motorized contraption" would not be needed, the picture is too blurry for me to make out what brand of ankle bracelet this is or I could tell you if it has one. GPS drift would make it impossible to tell if someone is moving in their house (Normally looking at GPS points shows a clustering around the house and sometimes as far as a 50+ meters outside their house.<p>As to those asking how he got it off, the article says it was "sliced" off so my guess is he cut the strap (then lied about the fall) which cut the fiber optic cable in the bracelet, he then reattached the fiber optic cable and taped it up. The police SHOULD have been sent as soon as they got a strap tamper alert but it appears they believed the fall story. Note most of the time police don't talk to the participants when this happens, rather a monitoring company staffs a call center then send recording of the call and notes to the user's supervisor who then can choose to alert the police. Apparently there is another way to get these off if the bracelet is loose enough that involves a plastic bag and sliding it off (a co-worker mentioned a video going around of it but I've never seen it) but due to the fact this article mentions they were alerted to it being tampered with I doubt that is the case.
If all he needed to do was to show some movement of the tracker, he could have just duct-taped it to a Roomba. He'd get much more realistic motion with much less effort.
Like the scene in Home Alone where the kid puts cardboard cutouts on a model train set, to make the burglars think there's a party happening at the house. :)<p>Edit: I guess that scene was more elaborate than I remembered: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHOuoJmcozk#t=2m13s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHOuoJmcozk#t=2m13s</a>