Same crime, different time-Pease family upset at 10-year sentence;

The daughter of a convicted bank robber languishing away in a federal prison wants to know why her father is serving eight years in prison while another man who robbed the exact same bank will serve just nine months for his crime.
‘It is the exact same bank and this other guy even attempted to rob another bank afterwards and he just gets one year,’ said Monica Cope, daughter of Russell Pease, convicted in 2004 for robbing what is now Citizens Tri-County Bank at Plaza Shopping Center. ‘It’s not fair. If he did the same crime, he should do the same time.’
Her concerns come after Carl Anthony Brakeall, 35, entered a guilty plea recently to charges of aggravated robbery and attempted robbery for holding up Citizen’s Tri-County at Plaza Shopping Center and then trying to rob the Citizen’s branch in Mt. Leo from the drive-thru lane on a motorcycle.
Brakeall got away with the Plaza robbery initially until his sister told police she had driven the getaway car, an admission which has her also facing robbery conspiracy charges. It was three weeks after the Plaza robbery that Brakeall pulled up to the drive-thru lane of the Mt. Leo branch brandishing what police believe was a pellet gun and demanded money. Brakeall also passed a note saying he had rigged the bank to explode. The teller refused Brakeall’s demands, prompting him to flee. He was caught hours later.
His crime came four years after Pease, also 35 at the time he robbed the Plaza branch and made away with $14,000. Pease was caught hours later at a payphone in Sparta. He would later maintain he was trying to commit suicide by trying to get police to shoot him, his wife of 16 years saying he had always been a good provider and honest man but had become suicidal in the months leading up to the robbery.
Unlike Brakeall, Pease’s case was picked up by federal prosecutors who sentenced him to 93 months in prison. However, then-District Attorney General Dale Potter went ahead with prosecuting Pease on the local level, saying just because federal authorities cherry-picked his case for prosecution did not relieve him of his obligation to face charges here.
Pease was then given a 10-year sentence to be served here, a sentence which is supposed to be run concurrently with his federal time. He has served about three years of his state time and is presently doing his federal time at a federal penitentiary in Kentucky.
‘I just held the newspaper and cried,’ Cope said when she saw the difference in the sentences between her father and Brakeall. ‘This just isn’t right. How can there be such a difference when it’s the same bank’?
According to District Attorney General Lisa Zavogiannis, the case against Brakeall had issues which contributed to the one-year plea deal.
‘It wasn’t a slam dunk,’ Zavogiannis said of Brakeall, whose sister was the main witness against him had the case gone to trial. ‘There were many contributing factors to the plea agreement, including things like looking at prior record.’
Zavogiannis noted Pease’s case came before she was elected and she does not know his background or the criminal history and therefore cannot compare the two.
‘The federal authorities could still come in and prosecute the case if they chose to,’ Zavogiannis said. ‘Mr. Brakeall is serving his time here but that doesn’t prevent him from being prosecuted federally.’
However, the revelation by the district attorney is no consolation for Cope, who noted she has endured five birthdays without her father and that with the high cost of gas, she and the family can only afford to make the trip to visit her father a few times a year.
‘What my dad did was wrong but so was what that other guy did,’ Cope said. ‘There just needs to be the same punishment.’