We live in North Dakota. My husband worked for an independant contractor that taught & supervised handi-capped people to work. They did janitorial work. Part of my husbands job was bringing the garbage in huge dumpsters up to where the garbage man dumped them into the garbage truck. For the first 2 1/2 years my husband worked there the garbage man took the garbage and didn't crush the stuff because there were books, cd's and tons of other stuff, he even ran an add in a local news paper to sell cds. One dumpster could have thousands of cd's in it.
There were no signs posted saying you weren't suppose to take garbage or that it was illeagal. They had no written policy or even a lousy memo that was given to them. Every day my husband watched post office workers and other contracters dig through the garbage and take things. Even the security guards took stuff. My husband even knows a man who had gone to Minneapolis MN to the Post Office to auctions were they sold the cd's in lotts.
My husband started taking cd's home and selling them to a used cd store. He worked there for 5 1/2 more years and continued to take cds home.
Then he was fired the first week of July for taking the cd's. They told him if he had any cd's at home they wanted them to destroy them. He said, "That's fine and let them come and take them to destory them". Two months later they charged him with 2 felonys for theft of post office mail and possetion of stolen property. They NEVER went and took back the cd's he had sold from the used cd store that still had a huge number of them in stock. They threatened him with a prison sentence and HUGE fines. Then a month later they offered him a deal if he would plead to a misdemenor of copy right infringment. We had a court appointed attorney and he advised my husband that going to trial he could end up serving time in prison. So he plead guilty to that. At the sentencing the judge said that it isn't garbage until it is in a hole in the landfill and that the responsibility still exists to keep them sucured until that point. He sentenced my husband to 2 years of probation (he has never even had a speeding ticket in his life) and ordered to repay the cd company 78,810.00.
There are several points I don't understand and I believe are just wrong. First of all they said it was a loss of profit to the cd company but they never took the cds back from the store. They could have returned thousands of cds. There were no signs or a written policy as to the destruction of the cds. They were put into garbage bags and into dumpsters sometimes piled next to the dumpster. My husband is being held responsible for what I believe should be the Post Offices responsibility. WHy isn't the Post Office responsible for seeling that a policy was put into place and then followed for the secured destruction of these items? Who's responsibility was it to make sure they were desposed of in a secure way? I work at a medical center and when we destroy client information the center is responsible to a policy to see that the information is desposed of in a secure manner. It is kept in a locked room until it is destroyed. If we through a client's chart in the garbage and the janitor got it ....it would US that were responsible NOT the janitor. I also don't understand how a United States Post Office could sell them in lotts. They were depriving the cd company of profits and putting the cds out into the market. The United States Govt. has been doing the VERY thing my husband was sentenced for. The prosecutor said this was an "Intellectual Crime" and that it was the number of cds he had taken over the 5 1/2 years. Soooo it's not illeagel to take some just don't talke too many? How intellectual do you have to be to see something in the garbage and know you could sell it. People do it on garbage clean up week all the time. They have tried to make him out to be this criminal saying that he snuck the cds. He worked until 7:00 or 7:30 at night. There wasn't anyone around when he finnished his shift. They said they GOT him on a servalence camera hiding the cds in a garbage can. Christ,,,,he had a garbage can that rolled, and he had put a bag with cds in it and then kept the regular garbage in a seperate garbage bag ....doesn't take a genius to figure out he didn't want to have to seperate the cds from the yucky stuff. Besides, if my neighbor through something out on his brim for garbage pick up and I wanted to take it, I would probably wait until after dark so that all my neighbors wouldn't see me. Not because I thought it was illeagel but because people might look down on me for taking something out of the garbage. Our family makes under 45,000.00 a year and we have two children. Paying back this 78,810.00 will take us a life time. Even if we could pay 200.00 a month which will be a stretch, it will take us almost 33 years to pay this off. It is a LIFE sentence for a misdemenor. We feel hopeless and feel like we are being punished VERY severally. The attorney said we can talk about an appeal, but he doesn't want us to get our hopes up. We need help. Some advice and some hope.

