Unbelievable! Utterly amazing! In 1999, eight years after he kidnapped Jaycee Dugard, the U.S. Parole Commission awarded Phillip Garrido a certificate of commendation for his good conduct while on parole and rewarded him with an early discharge from his 50-year prison term for a 1977 kidnapping and rape.
And now the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) is stonewalling attempts by the media to obtain Garrido’s parole supervision records. CDCR maintains that Garrido's parole agent operated "by the book." By the book? If that's true, the book he operated by must have been full of blank pages.
Obviously, neither the federal government nor the State of California provided this piece of shit with any meaningful parole supervision. And what little supervision they did provide failed to detect that Garrido was holding another kidnap victim, Dugard, captive on his premises during the past 18 years.
Here is the latest scoop from The Sacramento Bee:
COMMISSION ONCE LAUDED GARRIDO BEHAVIOR POST-RELEASE
By Sam Stanton and Denny Walsh
The Sacramento Bee
September 22, 2009
Nearly eight years after Jaycee Lee Dugard was kidnapped, Phillip Garrido received a certificate from the U.S. Parole Commission lauding him for his behavior since his release from prison in 1988.
"You are hereby discharged from parole," the March 9, 1999, certificate read.
"After a thorough review of your case, the Commission has decided that you are deserving of an early discharge," said the document signed by administrator Raymond E. Essex. "You are commended for having responded positively to supervision and for the personal accomplishment(s) you have made.
"The Commission trusts that you will continue to be a productive citizen and obey the laws of society."
The certificate is among 19 pages of parole commission papers released to The Bee under the federal Freedom of Information Act on Garrido, who allegedly kidnapped Dugard from in front of her South Lake Tahoe-area home in 1991, then managed to hide her from federal and state parole agents for years afterward.
Garrido had been convicted of kidnap and rape in 1977 in Nevada and sentenced to 50 years in federal prison and a concurrent state sentence of five years to life, The release of the documents adds perspective to how he managed to win release from federal parole after only 11 years. At the time he was sentenced, he was expected to be on federal parole until 2027.
After kidnapping Dugard in 1991, authorities allege, Garrido was able to keep her hidden in his Antioch-area backyard for 18 years. The federal records give only a bare-bones glimpse of Garrido's supervision during that time, and do not provide any indication of how regularly he was visited by federal parole agents.
After being released from federal parole in 1999, Garrido remained under California supervision. California corrections officials have refused to provide The Bee with records of how often agent Edward Santos visited Garrido's Antioch home between 1999 and last month, when Dugard was discovered alive after walking into Santos' office with Garrido.
Those parole records, requested by The Bee through a state Public Records Act request on Aug. 28, would include Santos' field notes from visits to the Garrido home and Garrido's visits to the Concord parole office.
Corrections officials have said Santos operated "by the book" and solved the mystery of Dugard's disappearance by calling police when she walked into his office.
On Tuesday, a corrections official said the matter was under review, but that the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation likely would refuse to release the parole records because of a two-month-old department regulation that does not allow release of agents' field notes. Previously, the department had cited a different law -- one that applied to probation records, not parole records -- to deny release of the documents.
Peter Scheer, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, said the state cannot create regulations that exempt it from laws that require disclosure of public documents.
"The department has no authority to amend the Public Records Act by regulation, and certainly has no authority to regulate the California constitution by regulation," Scheer said.
Garrido, 58, and his wife, Nancy, 54, are in the El Dorado County jail facing kidnap, rape and other charges stemming from Dugard's abduction when she was 11. Both have pleaded not guilty.
Since their arrest last month, law enforcement agencies have sought to determine if they can be tied to any other crimes, including the disappearances in 1988 and 1989 of two young Bay Area girls.
Police were continuing to dig through sections of the Garrido backyard Tuesday in connection with those disappearances, and said that if they do not find new evidence today they likely will end their search this afternoon.
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