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We've got news on the Aldon Smith LAX case. The Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office announced that they have referred the case to the Los Angeles County City Attorney's Office for misdemeanor consideration. Thanks to Mike Garafolo for passing along the press release.
@NinersNation Would you settle for a screen shot? pic.twitter.com/ycPQJb2BA5
— Mike Garafolo (@MikeGarafolo) April 24, 2014
The charge of false report of a bomb threat is a wobbler, which means it can be charged as either a misdemeanor or a felony. This would indicate that investigation of the situation revealed it really was not overly serious in the spectrum of hard core criminal vs. dumbass. Socalisteph broke this down in a bit more detail while discussing the referral of the case to the LAPD Criminal Conspiracy Unit.
In this case, Aldon did something stupid, but it was not to the level that it deserved to be charged as a felony. The city attorney will review the case and decide whether to press charges. This only means they are considering it, not that anything has yet been charged. If they charge him he could still conceivably do local jail time, but odds are they would plea something out, and he would get a fine.
While this should be a relatively simple resolution, the bigger question is what impact it has on his current legal proceedings in Santa Clara. His Santa Clara case combined his weapons charges and his DUI. There is an April 29 court date, but that is currently set as a discovery hearing. The two sides have likely been involved in plea negotiations, but the LAX incident could have tripped that up. We don't know how the Santa Clara DA is handling that case in terms of whether to offer anything resembling leniency to Aldon.
The 49ers have until May 3 to decide on Aldon's 5th year option, and the progress of his situation with Santa Clara authorities will play a big role in that. We'll keep an eye on that over the next five days leading up to the court date, and then the four days following leading up to the May 3 option deadline.