One-Year Sentence for Forgery of Court Order, Aimed at Getting Patch.com Article Altered or Deindexed

... though the defendant's other crimes likely affected the sentence.

The Manchester, Conn. Journal-Inquirer (Matthew P. Knox) reports that Imani Pennant (a former UConn student) has been sentenced to one year in prison for forgery, assault, and trespass. At first, he was routed to a diversionary program "for defendants with a psychiatric disability," and "all of the charges against him could have been erased" had he completed the program successfully. But he was ejected from the program for violating a protective order, and therefore sentenced on the original charges.

Pennant had forged an order that purported to dismiss the assault and trespass charges against him, and tried to use it to get Patch.com to remove an article about those charges (and to get Google to deindex the article). Here's the forged order:

And here's an excerpt from the police report:

14) … Pennant provided both verbal and written statements regarding the document at issue in this case. In these statements Pennant provided the following: that after his arrest in March by UConn Police, he noticed an article online at the Patch.com about the incident; that his friends saw the article as well; that he felt the article was an unfair portrayal of the incident; that he wanted the article removed or changed; that in order to do this he went online to a web site and generated a fake court document with his personal details inserted; that he printed the document, took a picture of the document with his Samsung Galaxy S7 phone, and sent it to both Google.com and the Patch.com; that he sent it to the author of the original Patch.com article so that he would remove or amend the article; that he sent it to Google.com to request that his name be removed from the search engine results that link to the Patch.com article; that he is sorry; that creating and sending this fake document was a mistake, that he meant no disrespect to the court, and that it will never happen again….

15) … [T]hese facts show lmani Pennant created and possessed a written instrument purporting to be officially issued by the Connecticut Superior Court with the intent to deceive both Google and the Patch.com. Accordingly, this Affiant requests that an arrest warrant be issued for lmani Pennant for 2 counts of Forgery in the 2nd degree.

The forged order was similar in some ways to the forgery in the Ken Haas matter (also coming out of Connecticut), though no charges have been filed in that case. Many thanks to the Lumen Database for invaluable research help.