A man accused of 54 counts of burglary pleaded guilty to the charges July 27 and was immediately released to 12 years of mandatory supervision including GPS monitoring. The plea deal also requires him to finish a six-month substance abuse treatment program and to pay back at least $158,000 in restitution to his victims.
Christopher Michael Paul Jackson had burgled 54 locations in Riverside and Moreno Valley, including restaurants, health clinics, medical officers and beauty salons, according to the District Attorney’s Office.
Court records show he had been charged in 34 other criminal cases, which resulted in 16 fines and two stints in county jail.
He would slide along the ground during his burglaries to avoid detection, causing the District Attorney’s Office to call him The Snake Burglar.
Jackson’s attorney, Erin Kirkpatrick of her own law office, said that the resolution was the best for both Jackson and the victims.
He would be able to get a job to pay back the $158,000 in restitution he owes to the victims, and his ankle monitor would absolve him of burglaries performed by a copycat snake burglar, Kirkpatrick said.
If he did reoffend, the monitor would ensure he’d be caught, and he would start a sentence in imprisonment, she said.
Kirkpatrick’s last words to Jackson as she dropped him off at this court-ordered rehabilitation stressed her opinion that his life ahead was up to his own decision whether to reform.
“Prove people wrong so we don’t have an article about you in two weeks,” Kirkpatrick told him.
Despite the benefits to the agreement, Kirkpatrick also said that probation opposed the long term location tracker due to cost.
Technically, the sentence gave him seven months in jail. That time was credited as completed due to time spent awaiting the case’s resolution and specifications in California law.
District Attorney Michael Hestrin disparaged Jackson’s release in a press release.
“It is unconscionable that a habitual offender like Christopher Jackson can steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from hard-working people, admit to it, and legally serve less time in jail than the time it will take his hundreds of victims to recoup their losses.”
Hestrin’s release said that Proposition 47, which reclassified certain felonies as misdemeanors in 2015, and Assembly Bill 109, which realigned criminal sentences in 2011, precluded Jackson from receiving any prison time.
Kirkpatrick said that police officers had gathered reports on Jackson’s burglaries but decided to submit them to the District Attorney’s Office one by one, waiting until his current criminal case was complete before adding a new one that they had known about at the beginning of prosecution. This resulted in a cycle of court appearances that was only stopped by prosecutor Courtney Breaux, Kirkpatrick said. Breaux directed police departments to submit all their reports on Jackson at once.
“They were doing it piece by piece, and it was not right,” Kirkpatrick said.
Other prosecutors might have taken the case as was and prosecuted it, but Breaux’s decision to consolidate the cases will allow Jackson to reform and pay back his victims, Kirkpatrick said.
