Last May, Matthew Arthur Stuthard used a forged piece of ID to try to buy an iPhone from an electronics store.
He was detained by store staff and subsequently arrested, charged and released from police custody on a promise to appear in court.
He didn’t.
Less than a week later, he sold a forged one-year transit pass to an undercover officer. He also made and sold a forged driver’s licence to the same officer for $200.
Upon searching Stuthard’s home, it was found he had the personal identification of 210 people, including passport and credit card information.
He also had 150 forged credit cards or cloned gift cards, 600 Future Shop credit documents, a native status card with his picture on it, a homemade postal key with about 100 stolen mail items, three fake $100 bills and templates for making other forged documents.
The details are in a Surrey Provincial Court sentencing judgement made public last week.
Stuthard had previously pleaded guilty to two charges of using a forged document.
Judge K.W. Ball sentenced Stuthard to two-and-a-half years in jail, with four months credit for time already served.
The sentence was exactly what Crown counsel was seeking, noting that Stuthard’s record dated back to 2002, when he was was found in possession of counterfeit money – an offense he repeated several times after. There were also many prior incidents of dangerous driving, flight from a peace officer, carrying a concealed weapon and property-type offences using forged or stolen credit cards, the Crown said.
Defense was seeking a conditional sentence. But Ball ruled that releasing Stuthard would likely put the community at risk, “not only of further offences but further offenses that might involve violence.”
