ARGUED NOVEMBER 4, 2013 — DECIDED NOVEMBER 15, 2013
Before EASTERBROOK, KANNE, and TINDER, Circuit Judges
EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge. In 2011 a Commissioner of Dixon .. lauded .. Crundwell, the City's Comptroller since 1983, because "she looks after every tax dollar as if it were her own." How right he was ...
The scheme was not particularly sophisticated. Crundwell opened an account at a local branch of Fifth Third Bank. The account was called "RSCDA Reserve Fund" and nominally was owned by the City, but Crundwell held sole control over disbursements. She used her authority as Comptroller to move money from the City's legitimate accounts to the RSCDA account. Once the money was there she wrote checks for her own benefit. She created bogus invoices to justify the transfers from the legitimate accounts.
For more than 20 years, the bank failed to notice that the funds in the RSCDA account were being put to private rather than public use ... The embezzlement was caught when a bank statement of the RSCDA account reached the Mayor by accident, and he phoned the FBI because the transactions it revealed startled him. The City sued the bank and the two auditors, which recently settled for approximately $40 million. Sales of Crundwell’s assets realized another $10 million, so the City has recovered much of what Crundwell took (if we disregard interest, which over this lengthy period would have been substantial) but lost the benefits, such as well-paved roads and efficient police, that the money could have achieved had it been available between 1990 and 2012.
Crundwell asked the judge to impose a sentence at the low end of the Guideline range, contending that a higher sentence could hold her well into her 70s (she was born in 1953). She contended that she had provided extraordinary assistance to the prosecution by describing all details of her scheme and helping agents marshal her assets, so that they could be sold for the City’s benefit. The prosecutor, by contrast, depicted Crundwell as being no more candid than she thought necessary and less candid than she should have been. She initially asserted that the embezzlement began in 1999 or 2000, a decade after it actually started, and that the total take was approximately $10 million. She admitted the earlier start, and the higher total, only when confronted by evidence. She did not bother to tell her debriefers that she began stealing from the City in 1988, using a method different from the RSCDA account, until federal agents discovered that additional crime on their own.
The district judge recognized that Crundwell had provided some aid, principally in rounding up assets, but he thought that the value of the assistance paled in comparison with the injury that Crundwell had inflicted .. The judge also noted that a 235-month sentence would allow Crundwell to be released in 2030, when she would be 77, well under the life expectancy of a 60-year-old woman.
In explaining why he chose a sentence above the Guideline range, the judge relied in part on U.S.S.G. §2B1.1 Application Note 19(A)(ii), which says that a sentence may depart from the range recommended by the Sentencing Commission for financial crimes when "the offense caused or risked substantial non-monetary harm. For example, the offense caused physical harm, psychological harm, or severe emotional trauma" ...
The district judge pronounced a substantively reasonable sentence after giving Crundwell full opportunity to present evidence and arguments. The judge thought a substantial penalty justified by considerations of deterrence and desert. Crundwell single-handedly stole from the citizens of a small community (Dixon’s population is under 16,000) ten times as much as public officials in the Teapot Dome Affair, the national government’s most notorious financial scandal, misappropriated from the citizenry of the country as a whole ... Crundwell maintains that the judge did not consider her arguments, but the judge addressed every one of them. That he thought less well of her cooperation than Crundwell herself did, and gave a lower weight to her age than she asked him to, does not undermine the sentence’s validity. Judges must consider a defendant’s principal arguments but need not agree with them.
https://localtvwqad.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/appeals-court-ruling-in-rita-crundwell-case.pdf
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