A Massachusetts State Police trooper charged with stealing a Bobcat excavator is still collecting a taxpayer-funded paycheck after being suspended with pay — the kind of kid-glove treatment no ordinary citizen facing felony charges would ever see.

Trooper Joseph Franklin was hit with felony larceny and witness intimidation charges after allegedly swiping a Bobcat T-190 loader from a contractor in Palmer, western Massachusetts. Franklin claimed the contractor failed to complete $11,000 in storm cleanup work on his property, and his attorney told him to hold the machine as collateral. Palmer Sgt. Jeremy Haley wasn't buying it. "I explained to Franklin that he could not hold onto the property without a court order and that doing so would be considered larceny of the property," Haley wrote in the incident report. The sergeant added that Franklin should have known better: "Franklin should know the above information and have a basic understanding of the larceny laws as he graduated from the Massachusetts State Police Academy."

Franklin also asked officers not to activate their body cameras while he retrieved the stolen equipment from his garage, according to the Herald — apparently concerned about the optics of a uniformed trooper returning stolen property. Sgt. Haley told him camera policy required recording.

Following a clerk magistrate hearing in early July, Franklin was charged with larceny over $1,200 and intimidating a witness/juror/police/court official. A week later, Mass State Police suspended him — with pay. "Trooper Joseph Franklin was suspended with pay on July 9th following a duty status hearing," a department spokesperson said in a statement. Franklin pleaded not guilty at his mid-July arraignment and was released on personal recognizance. The Massachusetts POST Commission subsequently suspended his law enforcement certification.

The numbers tell the story. Franklin took home nearly $95,000 last year — $82,558 in base pay plus overtime and other compensation, according to state payroll records cited by the Herald. As of last week, he had already collected $63,846 this year, and the checks keep coming.

Contrast that with how the system treats people without a badge or connections. In Fairfax County, Virginia, an illegal alien from Honduras named Nehemia Noel Fuentes-Banegas was held without bond after allegedly grabbing a police officer's arm and attempting to disarm him during a domestic incident call. The Gateway Pundit reported that Fuentes-Banegas illegally entered the U.S. in 2022 and was released into the country by the Biden administration. He sits in a cell. No paycheck. No paid leave. The disparity in how the state treats its own versus everyone else — whether an illegal alien or an ordinary citizen without connections — is the open sore nobody in institutional power wants to acknowledge.

The question isn't whether Franklin is guilty — that's for a court. The question is why a trooper charged with felony theft and witness intimidation gets to keep drawing a publicly funded salary while the case winds through the system, when any working stiff facing the same charges would be fired and forgotten.