When I found out that Assistant United States Attorney Scott Kerin was no longer prosecuting my case I was upset and worried. Worried about who might get the case next. I have never before been able to say that about a prosecutor that has prosecuted me but I can say that about Scott Kerin because he was fair. When he inherited my case from Gregory Ralph Nyhus I was being railroaded with an indictment that I was not guilty of. I was charged with assaulting federal officers resulting in bodily injury. Nyhus was a nightmare that did not care about the truth and did everything he could to lock me up as long as he could even though there was no evidence that anyone except for me was injured in that incident. Nyhus' only plea offer was for 63 months and we were getting ready to go to trial.
Then my attorneys told me that that Nyhus was not on the case anymore and that Scott Kerin offered to let me plea to a lesser charge that was never in the original indictment. As part of that he would recommend a sentence of time served even though that was below the recommended sentence on the guidelines. Now I am home because Scott Kerin did what a prosecutor is supposed to do. He looked at the evidence and picked a charge that fit the evidence. That and he took extenuating circumstances into account regarding what sentence I should receive.
On top of that he treated me with respect. Unlike Nyhus, Scott Kerin shook my hand and had a real conversation with me. He had a good attitude. Nyhus on the other hand was nothing but pure venom when he spoke. I feel like I was really lucky to get Scott Kerin assigned to my case because even though I felt that I could have beaten the bodily injury charge based on there being no evidence of injury, you never know what will happen at a trial, and there was a good chance I would have gotten more time for a lesser offense. It is hard to beat sworn deputies claiming to have been struck without video evidence to the contrary. My hope would have been that their inability to prove injury would lead to an inability to proving that they were struck in the first place, but juries are not usually like that. They like to find a compromise in the middle and for me the middle would have been something like not guilty of causing injury but guilty of striking them. I did admit to throwing chips but that was all I did. There were no elbows or kicks, just chips.
Now Kerin did not make concessions everywhere. There are certain things he can't concede and still be doing his job. As much as I would like to say that he should have dropped everything, that just is not realistic. Throwing chips in someone's face is not legal. I still think that I lacked the intent to intimidate element of the charge because if you ask most people what they think when someone throws food at them is that someone is throwing food at them and not that they are trying to cause them injury, but that offer was as good an offer as I could have expected to get. The entire time Scott Kerin prosecuted me he never used dirty tricks and I felt like I could finally try to go about my life without fearing a knock on my door for something I either did not do or something I did being exaggerated or made to be something it was not. I am thankful for those things.
I hear that Mr. Kerin will be in Eastern Europe training law enforcement to fight cyber crime. Darkweb type stuff. As long as he stays away from companies that host websites for me we should be good.