Good. That is a disgrace.
I'm curious what justifies the split, where some guys get no jail time and Williams gets a decade. I guess they're after the lead guy, but none of this would have happened without plenty of willing participants.
I don't necessarily disagree with Williams' sentence (I just don't know enough about what actually happened to form a proper opinion), but it's not like these other guys didn't know what they were getting themselves into. Seems they got off pretty easy.
Yeah. In the case of Allen, cited above, he stole $400k. He gets community service for that. The punishment doesn't seem to fit the crime.
It also says TA paid back the funds, which may have had an impact?
It usually does in these "white collar" crimes, but I'm not sure it's the difference between ten years and community service.
By way of analogy, I've defended welfare / food stamps / unemployment fraud cases. Getting a "deferred disposition" is pretty typical: you plead guilty, sentencing is deferred for a year, and if you meet certain conditions, you can withdraw your plea. Often, that results in your plea to a felony being dropped to a misdemeanor. One of the conditions is often paying restitution to the victim.
Anyway, long story short, on one case I talked the prosecutor into an outcome where my client could walk away with only a fine if he repaid something like the $14,000.00 he had defrauded. The judge rejected the plea, saying it was too light. Obviously, that's state rather than federal court, and every fact pattern is different, but it was very, very routine for people who had robbed the state or their employer to do jail time, even after paying the money back.