JUDGE GIVES EX-SHERIFF A CHOICE IN SENTENCING

RALEIGH -- A federal judge said Thursday he may sentence former Robeson
County Sheriff Glenn Maynor to at least seven years in prison -- a
stiff departure from sentencing guidelines that call for only 18
months to two years behind bars.

U.S. District Judge Terrence Boyle postponed sentencing Maynor after
giving him a choice: take the seven-year sentence or roll the dice and
hope for leniency. "If you've got a lot of skeletons in your closet,
you might want to take it," the judge said.

Boyle mentioned a case that came before him years ago involving video
poker in Robeson County. He suggested that someone may have paid
$500,000 to keep criminal charges from being filed.

Before agreeing to the continuance, Boyle said he was reserving the
right to increase Maynor's sentence to 10 years. A date for a new
hearing was not announced. Maynor, who served as sheriff from 1994 to
2004, pleaded guilty in September to lying to a grand jury and to
allowing deputies to get paid for working at his home and at his
election campaign's golf tournament. The guilty plea stems from a
six-year investigation into corruption in the Sheriff's Office. The
investigation, known as Operation Tarnished Badge, has resulted in 22
former Robeson County lawmen pleading guilty. Tarnished Badge became
public last June, when federal prosecutors announced a 10-count
indictment against former deputies C.T. Strickland, Roger Taylor and
Steven Lovin.

Strickland and Taylor also went before Boyle on Thursday. Lovin is
scheduled to go before him today.

The indictment accused Lovin of stealing tens of thousands of dollars
from drug dealers he stopped on Interstate 95. It accused Taylor of
conspiring to burn two homes and a pawnshop and with paying off
confidential informants with marijuana and cocaine. It accused
Strickland of assaulting a drug dealer and stealing $11,000 from him,
as well as stealing money from the federal program that redistributes
drug money.

All three men entered plea bargains. Multiple counts against them were
dismissed in exchange for their cooperation, which prosecutors say
helped lead to charges against Maynor and others.

But Boyle was clearly upset with the recommended sentences provided by
the federal probation office. He said minimal punishment could result
in another "episode and chapter in a long and very tragic story."
Boyle sentenced Taylor to the maximum recommended sentence -- three
years and 10 months -- for misappropriating money from the federal
drug-equity program. Taylor also was fined $10,000 and given three
years of supervised probation after his release. He was ordered to
report to prison July 1. Before the sentencing, Taylor apologized and
said that he would accept the punishment and that he was not proud of
what happened early in his career. His lawyer, Sue Berry of
Wilmington, argued that the Sheriff's Office hired Taylor as a
19-year-old high school graduate with no training. He came into a
department that already was full of corruption, Berry said. Although
he followed others, he has changed, she said.

"He has looked at me and said, 'I am a better man for having put
myself through this process,'" she said.

Boyle wasn't buying it. "I reject this entire premise -- that you have
an evolving sense of what's moral, what's lawful ... . You don't get
to learn what's right 10 years later," he said.

A State Bureau of Investigation agent who has worked on the case since
2002 was unhappy with Taylor's sentence.

"I work on the case for 72 months and he only gets 46 months," the
agent said outside the courtroom.

Boyle called the recommended two-year sentence for Strickland "fairly
outrageous," and dressed down U.S. Assistant Attorney Frank Bradsher,
the lead prosecutor.

"That's as scandalous as what the defendants did," Boyle said. Boyle
said dozens of federal inmates could be set free because the Robeson
County deputies who handled their cases were corrupt. The county's
district attorney, Johnson Britt, has thrown out more than 300 cases
handled by deputies who have pleaded guilty.

Thursday morning, Boyle said he was going to depart from the
recommended sentence for Strickland and give him more time behind
bars. The judge postponed sentencing until the afternoon, then
postponed it again until this morning after sparring with Strickland's
lawyer, Joe Zeszotarski of Raleigh.