Help Sargent Binkley get Justice!

A friend of mine from high school has ran into some trouble. He was arrested a bit ago for holding up 2 pharmacies in the Bay Area to get Percocet, which he became addicted to after a hip injury he suffered while in Bosnia as an Army Ranger. I have created an online petition in support of his situation. It is located here:

http://www.petitiononline.com/binkley/petition.html

Sargent Binkley was born and raised in Los Altos, California. He attended Los Altos High School, where he excelled in school while playing on the football and rugby teams and becoming an Eagle Scout. Binkley’s goal as a teenager was to work hard enough to enroll at the US Military Academy in West Point, NY. He succeeded, and matriculated there in 1993. After graduation he entered the US Army, joining the elite Rangers and passed the notoriously difficult airborne jump course.

Sargent was sent to Bosnia after his graduation, where he served as a peacekeeper by guarding the mass graves of genocide victims. From there he was sent to Central America, where he participated in drug interdiction operations. At one point he was ordered to open fire on a truck that contained a civilian teenage boy, an act that haunts him to this day. While on duty in Honduras, he fractured his pelvis and dislocated a hip. This injury was consistently misdiagnosed by Army physicians over the next several years, resulting in chronic pain and an addiction to prescription painkillers.

Sargent mustered out of the Army in 2002 and returned to civilian life. He worked for a time until his chronic pain and addiction destroyed his ability to be productive. He moved back home with his parents, who paid for a diagnosis by a private sports physician. The private doctor used a high-resolution MRI and found tears in the cartilage of his left hip, injuries that the military medical system had been unable to find. Surgery finally fixed the problem. After this his prescriptions from the VA were discontinued but his addiction remained, compounded by a psychiatric diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Sargent held up two Walgreens pharmacies in 2006 – one in Mountain View on the twentieth of January, the second in San Carlos on the third of March. He used an unloaded gun, harmed no one, and left only with bags full of painkillers. Shortly after the second robbery he turned himself in. He has been in the Redwood City jail ever since, awaiting his sentencing and undergoing a drug rehabilitation program.

Sargent is due to be sentenced on Thursday, September 20, 2007 in the Sunnyvale Courthouse of the Santa Clara County Superior Court. The prosecuting attorneys are David Howe (Santa Clara County) and Steve Wagstaffe (San Mateo County); they control Sargent’s fate.

Sargent’s family has already presented their case to Santa Clara District Attorney David Howe, but at this point, only a focused outpouring of support can help. Steve Wagstaffe, the assistant DA in San Mateo County, will conclude his prosecution once proceedings in Santa Clara County are finished. In spite of his private offer to reduce the charges, he has not made any personal appeal to the Santa Clara District Attorney's office to remove the gun charge and pursue a more lenient sentence including probation and treatment. Letters or phone calls to his office in support of Sargent are equally as important as those to the District Attorney in Santa Clara County, because they may convince Mr. Wagstaffe to become more vocal with his colleagues in Santa Clara, and help to influence the outcome of sentencing there.

The Mountain View pharmacist himself has written supporting leniency for Sargent, as have several veterans organizations, military colleagues of Sargent, and concerned California citizens. You can join them! We urge you to please take a few minutes of your time to support Sarge by putting pressure on the DA to pursue a more reasonable sentence.

Thanks for your help.

Chris