Prosecutors, defense lawyers and others are battling over unresolved questions: Is prison the right punishment? And, if so, should the amount of money a parent paid in the scam determine their time behind bars?
As a judge in Boston prepares to sentence parents in the college admissions cheating scandal, prosecutors, defense lawyers and others are battling over unresolved questions: Is prison the right punishment? And, if so, should the amount of money a parent paid in the scam determine their time behind bars?
So far, 15 of the nearly three dozen parents charged with conspiring to commit fraud with the scam’s leader, college admission consultant William “Rick” Singer, have pleaded guilty. The first two in the group were slated to be sentenced this week, but U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani hit pause in the proceedings to resolve a stark disagreement over how she should calculate the parents’ culpability.
The dispute revolves around whether Singer caused the universities and testing companies he exploited any financial loss. Under federal sentencing guidelines, prison terms for fraud are typically pegged to a victim’s financial loss. If the loss cannot be tallied, the amount a perpetrator gained can be used instead. Singer has pleaded guilty to four felonies, acknowledging he rigged SAT and ACT exams for his clients and misrepresented their children as recruits for sports they didn’t play.
Since March, when they announced charges against Singer, his alleged accomplices and parents, prosecutors haveand companies that administer college entrance exams as the victims in the case. Instead of attempting to pin down the loss to a particular school or company, prosecutors required parents to sign plea agreements that included proposed prison sentences based on the amount of money they paid in Singer’s scheme.
to send Huffman to prison for one month — a penalty at the low end of the zero-to-six-month range called for by sentencing guidelines.to paying Singer $400,000 to sneak his son in to Georgetown, the government used the larger dollar figure to boost his sentencing range under the guidelines to 21 to 27 months. Prosecutors ultimately decided to show the business executive leniency by asking Talwani to go below the guideline’s range and put him behind bars for 15 months.
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