Syracuse, NY -- Dressed in a blue rose print dress, Linda Wilson stood by the railing in Onondaga County Court Thursday trembling and choking back tears. Ten feet away at the defendant’s table, her son, Thomas Wilson, a lanky 18-year-old dressed in an orange and white jump suit stood quietly, hands shackled around his waist. Forty years was at stake....
Syracuse, NY -- Dressed in a blue rose print dress, Linda Wilson stood by the railing in Onondaga County Court Thursday trembling and choking back tears.
Ten feet away at the defendant’s table, her son, Thomas Wilson, a lanky 18-year-old dressed in an orange and white jump suit stood quietly, hands shackled around his waist.
Forty years was at stake.
“My client has asked me to earnestly beg you for youthful offender (status),” Wilson's lawyer Anne S. Meadvin told Judge Joseph Fahey.
Thomas Wilson was a star athlete with a good grades, she said. Harvard, Princeton and Yale were among the 30 colleges that had sent him letters asking him to consider attending their schools, Meadvin said.
After listening briefly, the judge said he couldn't grant Wilson youthful offender status because of the nature of the burglaries of which he is accused. “I won’t do that,” Fahey replied.
Last October, Wilson and two other boys were accused of burglarizing a home in Syracuse while the owner cowered in a bathroom, Meadvin said. As the victim called police, she could hear the boys talking and moving things around in her home, she said.
The judge laid out Wilson’s choices: Plead guilty to burglarizing the Syracuse home in October and receive a sentence of 3.5 years, or risk going to trial on that charge plus two other burglaries that took place in January.
If convicted, the 18-year-old would face consecutive sentences of up to 15 years for each charge, or 45 years.
After speaking with her client and his family privately, Meadvin reported to the judge that Wilson would accept the offer. He pleaded guilty to felony burglary and will be sentenced by Fahey on July 22.
Later outside the courtroom, Meadvin said her client fell in with bad companions and “exercised the poorest judgment.”
“He is smart. He’s young. He will emerge from this a better person,” she said.