The former police chief of Biscayne Park, Florida, Raimundo Atesiano, has been sentenced to three years in prison for conspiring to frame numerous innocent people of color in order to improve his department’s arrest numbers. The crimes of which Atesiano was convicted on took place over the period that he headed the Biscayne Park police force, in 2013-2014. The Miami Herald reports that Atesiano tried to plead that he is a terrible person during his sentencing.
“When I took the job, I was not prepared,” Atesiano told a federal judge on Tuesday. “I made some very, very bad decisions.”
And while some media outlets are considering this a strong sentence, reporting things like “the judge wasn’t swayed,” the fact remains that the suffering of the innocent people that Atesiano sent to prison was a lot worse than spending three years in prison.
According to previous court filings, at Chief Atesiano’s direction, Ravelo falsely arrested a victim identified as “C.D.” and another victim identified as “E.B.” C.D. was charged with two residential burglaries, and E.B. was charged with five vehicle burglaries, both without probable cause. In court filings related to his guilty plea, Atesiano admitted that he instructed Ravelo to falsely arrest and charge E.B for five vehicle burglaries based upon what Atesiano knew were false confessions.
Three other police officers have already been sentenced for their equally corrupt racist abuse of the law.
In August, Officers Charlie Dayoub, 38, and Raul Fernandez, 62, pleaded guilty to falsifying the arrest affidavits for a 16-year-old black suspect for four unsolved break-ins in June 2013. That was just a month before then-police chief Atesiano touted the town’s 100 percent burglary clearance record at a village commission meeting. In October, Judge Moore sent each to prison for a maximum one-year term.
Miami-Dade County's public defender, Carlos Martinez, told WPLG Local 10 news that the conviction of Atesiano and his thug patrol puts upwards of two thousand arrests into question.
The 16-year-old had his case thrown out, but 35-year-old Clarence Desrouleaux (referred to as C.D. by the court) was not as lucky. Desrouleaux, who was sentenced to and served five years in prison for a crime he did not commit; was subsequently deported to Haiti. According to the Miami Herald the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office threw out Desrouleaux’s conviction after the Atesiano conviction. What that means with regard to his deportation remains unclear.