In June 2012, Scott Robert Skallerud got high on methamphetamine and heroin before robbing two Wells Fargo Banks in Santa Ana during a nine-day period.
Skallerud's motive?
He wanted money to pay for more narcotics and to buy food.
Given sentencing guidelines, a federal prosecutor determined that the appropriate punishment should be 63 months in prison in part because Skallerud's rap sheet is hefty.
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He's already been convicted of grand theft three times (April 1994, February 2009 and May 2011); possession of a controlled substance twice (January 1999 and October 2003); possession of a deadly weapon (October 2003); burglary (May 2011) and false personation (May 2011) as well as 16 parole violations between 1995 and 2007.
This week inside Orange County's Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse, U.S. District Court Judge Cormac J. Carney took into consideration that this 43-year-old defendant suffers from documented mental health issues and handed him a punishment of 51 months in prison.
He's presently housed in the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles.
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CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.