Homeless man who tried to buy food and toothpaste with fake $20 note jailed for six years

Levi Mitchell was trying to buy ‘basic human necessities’ before his arrest, New York court rules

Homeless man was found in possession of five counterfeit bills (Getty)

A homeless man who tried to use a counterfeit $20 bill to buy food and toothpaste has been sentenced to up to six years in prison.

Levi Mitchell, 53, was found guilty of “criminal possession of a forged instrument” after attempting to use the fake bill at a pharmacy in New York City and again at a nearby restaurant.

Cashiers at both establishments rejected the homeless man’s note, before police officers later found him in possession of five counterfeit $20 bills, each worth around £15.

Mitchell was initially sentenced to up to eight years in prison following the March 2015 offence, but he had his sentence reduced to between three and six years by the New York Supreme Court’s Appellate Division this week.

The court acknowledged Mitchell was trying to buy “basic human necessities” before his arrest.

“The immediate object of defendant’s crime was to purchase basic human necessities, including food and toothpaste,” the court noted in its report. “In consideration of the fact that he was a 53 year-old, unemployed homeless man, with longstanding medical and substance abuse issues, a reduction of his sentence to three to six years is appropriate.”

Associate Justice Peter Tom was the only dissenter to the panel’s majority ruling.

The judge said Mitchell’s crime deserved the longer sentence handed down in November 2015, partly because of the homeless man’s previous convictions.

He also said Mr Mitchell had been “actively engaged in a counterfeiting scheme in which he sought to obtain genuine currency as change for small dollar transactions”.

Justice Tom added: “He was not merely using a single counterfeit bill to purchase “human necessities” as the majority characterises it. Rather, it appears he was part of a counterfeiting scheme to change counterfeit bills for real currency.”

The court said that Mitchell’s most recent convictions were “nonviolent misdemeanours” and were mostly related to his “longtime drug addiction”.

According to Vera Institute of Justice figures from 2015, it costs taxpayers an average of $69,000 (£53,000) a year to incarcerate someone at New York state prison.