Anderson Sentencing

BATON ROUGE, LA – United States Attorney Donald J. Cazayoux, Jr. announced that RAMON ANDERSON, age 54, was sentenced to 84 months imprisonment on charges of possession of a gun by a convicted felon and failure to register as a sex offender under the Sex Offender Notification and Registry Act (known as SORNA). ANDERSON was also sentenced to 5 years supervised release after imprisonment.

ANDERSON’S sentence this morning follows a jury trial on the gun charge in June 2012 and a guilty plea in July 2012 on the failure to register charge. At trial, officers of the Baton Rouge Police Department described how a routine traffic stop in September 2008 for a driving infraction led to ANDERSON’S arrest for felon in possession of a firearm. After a three-day trial in which ANDERSON denied possessing the firearm, the jury convicted ANDERSON of the gun charge.

Following the gun trial, ANDERSON later pled guilty to the charge of failure to register as a sex offender. He admitted that he had been previously convicted of rape in Mississippi in 1985 and had been living unregistered in a Baton Rouge apartment complex since early January 2011. ANDERSON came to the attention of authorities in March 2011 based upon a tip to Louisiana State Probation and Parole. The state probation officer provided the information to East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office deputies who were also members of the Marshals-led Sex Offender Locate and Arrest Team (SOLAT) in Baton Rouge. Authorities investigating ANDERSON’S failure to register learned that the defendant had also falsely registered a relative’s address in Franklin County, Mississippi, during the same time period.

ANDERSON was required to register as a sex offender in Louisiana within 3 days of moving to Louisiana pursuant to SORNA, also known as the AdamWalsh Act. The registration process would have notified ANDERSON’S neighbors of his address and status as a sex offender.

United States Attorney Cazayoux remarked, “ANDERSON’S upward departure in this case sends a message to unregistered sex offenders and felons who unlawfully possess firearms that their crimes will not be perceived as mere paperwork violations. The 84-month sentence should be a wake-up call to sex offenders who live unregistered in our district, as well as to felons who unlawfully possess firearms.”

The investigation of this matter was conducted by the U.S. Marshals Service, the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s Office, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives, and the Baton Rouge Police Department. The case was prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorneys Susan Amundson, Chris Dippel, and Cam Le.