By Natasha Pawar and Natalia Claburn
WOODLAND, CA – A man was accused of pretending to be someone he is not to escape multiple but minor misdemeanor charges, and it landed him back in Yolo County Superior Court here last week.
He ultimately pleaded no contest to the charges and was sentenced to 30 days in Yolo County Jail.
However, it was not readily apparent in the courtroom that Larry Lee Clark, Jr., has not been on a major crime spree. He had some minor drug possession, falsely identified himself, had a small baton and didn’t appear in court on time between the years 2017 and 2020.
On November 18, 2017, Clark “willfully and unlawfully and falsely represented [himself] as another person or a fictitious person to a police officer when [he was] either lawfully detained or arrested and [he] did that in order to evade the process of the courts or to evade proper identification,” stated Judge Stephen Mock.
Then, on March 29 of 2018, Clark was yet again in hot water when he violated his “written promise to appear on criminal case 19-9679,” which one can assume was the case involving illegal weapons possession, false identification, and possession of narcotics.
The third and final case for Clark occurred on March 15, 2020, where the defendant was found with a prohibited weapon that a law enforcement officer described as “an expandable baton.”
Despite the original arrest deeming Clark’s possession of a prohibited weapon to be a felony, Judge Mock said, “I’m granting the People’s implicit request to reduce Count 1 to a misdemeanor,” resulting in Clark only facing misdemeanor charges.
With a simple and almost inaudible, “Yes, sir,” Clark pleaded no contest to all of the charges filed against him. Judge Mock accepted these pleas.
For all three cases, the terms were the same, including, per his public defender, “one-year summary probation, minimum fines…searchable for drugs and paraphernalia, and weapons, do not possess illegal weapons or drugs or paraphernalia, (and) there would be 10 days jail in each case.”
Not long after the terms of Clark’s probation and fines were outlined, the audio for the courtroom live stream was cut out, causing an abrupt end to the pretrial.
Before the livestream ended, Judge Mock stated that Clark is subject to the reinstatement of the probation he violated along with a $750 fine where he must pay “$50 a month beginning July 1 and will continue to pay on the 1st of every month” until the fine has been paid in full.
To sign up for our new newsletter – Everyday Injustice – https://tinyurl.com/yyultcf9
Support our work – to become a sustaining at $5 – $10- $25 per month hit the link:
