Two Savannah residents were sentenced last Thursday by Senior District Court Judge B. Avant Edenfield for their roles in federal firearms violations in the Savannah area.
Jacques Pope, 21, was sentenced to 96 months in prison for being a felon in possession of ammunition; Antwan Clark, 24, was sentenced to 84 months in prison for, in part, possessing a firearm during a drug trafficking crime.
Edenfield ordered that both sentences run consecutively to state sentences that defendants were currently serving for unrelated crimes.
Evidence during the sentencing hearings revealed that Pope, a felon, discharged a firearm on New Year’s Eve, 2011, and struck a pedestrian. While a firearm was not recovered, evidence linked the discharged ammunition to Pope.
Clark was sentenced after Savannah-Chatham Counter Narcotics Team executed a search warrant at his residence where marijuana, cocaine, and loaded firearms were recovered.
Both cases were prosecuted under Project Ceasefire, a joint firearms initiative of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the Chatham County District Attorney’s Office, the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the Savannah-Chatham Metro Police Department. Project Ceasefire is a cooperative effort between federal and local law enforcement agencies to combat gun crime by targeting felons previously convicted of drug offenses or crimes of violence and who are found to be in possession of firearms, as well as those who commit violent gun offenses.
During 2012, the United States Attorney’s Office charged 55 defendants with federal firearms offenses that were committed in the Savannah area.