Attorneys finally have a jury in the trial of suspended Greensboro police detective Scott “Scooter” Sanders, who —as WFMY’s Frank Mickens dutifully reported— appears again and again in the infamous RMA report that prompted Greensboro City Manager Mitchell Johnson to lock then-Police Chief David Wray out of his office. (Just a little primer for any statewide readers.)
Sanders is on trial for hacking into a HUD computer loaned to Officer Julius Fulmore, who, by the way, would go on to unsuccessfully sue Wray and Sanders. The lingering question in this whole deal is exactly what Fulmore was doing with a HUD computer. Guess what ——HUD special agent Mark Heinbach “couldn’t explain” why he let Fulmore “use the computer for years after the joint operation they were working on had ended.”
With that in mind, the question for the jury is whether or not Sanders committed a crime by hacking into a computer Fulmore wasn’t authorized to use. A commenter over at Guarino’s thinks not:
I personally think that Sanders should be applauded for his initiative in getting into a government owned HUD computer,that had been loaned to an officer under suspicion of wrong doing. Considering the scandal with Project Homestead in this area & their connection with HUD, it probably should have been hacked into a little sooner.
Regular readers to this blog know that HUD is not my favorite federal bureaucracy, so I question pretty much everything it does.