WELCOME TO WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH

Is My Friend Going to Federal Prison?

She’ll know — one week from today

For my friend, it’s hard to think about anything else as these next days loom larger and larger. Lights that were previously far away, blinking dully from a distant tunnel, are now flashing brightly like an oncoming train with shrieking alarms and clattering bells.

It’s like a Netflix movie you’ve been watching for several seasons. A year ago the protagonist gets arrested.

This season, after dozens of delays and false starts, after stereotypical bumbling lawyers keep making ridiculous mistakes and causing endless angst.

After kicking the can down the road in hopes it will just all go away — we are now at the end of the final season.

But unfortunately this is not a Netflix series. This is real life with a real person whose life may be upended in countless ways. Hell, it’s already been upended for six years.

To learn how this attractive, socially connected middle-aged woman — who has spent a good deal of her life working with non-profits — became embroiled in a situation that now may potentially land her in prison for twenty years and pay fines up to two million dollars, read below.

I’m not guilty and I will NOT plead guilty to anything

Shara, sixty-four, has a heart shaped face and salt-and-pepper curls that reach her collar bone. She’s slender and petite, looking more like a forty-something than a sixty-something.

I remember us sitting together last year in her screened in back porch. We perched comfortably on vintage leather-backed bar stools sipping chardonnay and munching on chips and her homemade salsa.

She vowed she would never take a plea agreement. Why on earth would she admit to doing something she did not do. She pounded lightly on the table for emphasis, startling her half-deaf husky sitting at her feet and sending her calico cat flying into the kitchen.

“Sorry,” she laughed. Her husky glanced at her reproachfully and then sank back down into his nap.

But seriously, what the actual fuck do they want me to do?

Soon enough she learned.

Shara was finally worn down by her attorney and her husband to plead guilty to something, anything . . . just to put this nightmare behind them.

Well, not just anything, of course not.

Pleading guilty to conversion

She, her attorney, and her husband got into a huddle and went over the various “crimes” that she could claim she was guilty of.

They wanted to pin a felony conviction on her for embezzlement. The problem for the prosecution was that they could find no evidence Shara had stolen a dime.

She readily admitted she was not the greatest bookkeeper in the world. Perhaps errors she had made while transferring grant funds from one account to another could have triggered . . .something?

Money was missing, that was for sure. But Shara hadn’t taken it. Nonetheless, she was indicted and arrested for theft ranging in the millions.

Forensic accountants — hired not only by the feds but by also by her husband to do a second investigation—had crawled through every account and every credit card she, her husband and her two adult kids owned.

All they could find were a few unaccounted for receipts that Shara readily admitted were mistakes she’d made parceling out funds for a variety of purposes.

After grinding down the litany of hysterical felony charges she was first accused of and later indicted on they landed on something called conversion, a Class A misdemeanor.

It sounded innocuous enough.

In criminal law, conversion is when someone is accused of intentionally taking unauthorized control over someone else’s property. It differs from theft because there’s no intent to deprive the other person of the use of the “converted” property.

In Shara’s case this pertained to around $900 worth of professional work clothing she’d paid for using the non-profit’s credit card. This was supposedly the “converted” property.

The clothing was bought several years ago. It was intended to be used by women with little means to wear for job interviews after completing their back-to-work program.

“I remember those jackets and skirts,” Shara said. “I wear a size 4. These are sizes 14 and over. What would I even do with them?”

Shara was sick to her stomach on having to enter any kind of plea bargain. She still wanted a jury trial, and was convinced she’d exonerated if given the chance.

But her attorney and husband argued if a trial was on the menu this ordeal would likely stretch into several more years. So, she was ready to cop to anything as nutty as this to just make it all stop.

With numerous motions to continue, postponements and a prosecution team that seemed to switch up players every six months, her case was already going into its sixth year.

She just wanted to get her life back.

Public humiliation

Shara had already been publicly humiliated. She was dragged out of her house one morning and taken into custody where she was booked, fingerprinted and thrown into jail.

After her husband Jason arrived and bailed her out she was confronted by the news media waiting outside her home. To this day she’s not sure who gave them the tip.

It was probably someone who knew someone from the prosecution team.

In many if not most cases like this, the defendant is usually asked to go to the police department for booking and are then released on their own recognizance. At least that’s what I’ve always heard.

But nope, these folks wanted to play hardball with a woman who hadn’t had a traffic ticket since she was a teenager, and who had at one time served on the local Crime Stoppers Board.

The sentencing memorandum

Then things started going all Twilight Zoneish.

Four weeks ago Shara was presented with a sentencing memorandum and a date to appear before the judge.

After she pleaded guilty to conversion —and was still hazy about what that even meant as it pertained to her — she was suddenly staring at 30 pages detailing her “abuse of trust,” her “non-acceptance of responsibility,” her “need to reflect on the seriousness of her offense,” and an “offense level calculation” whereby the recommended sentence was that of 24 months of incarceration and $2M in restitution.

This, for a Class A Misdemeanor?

Who was really responsible for embezzling the grant money?

As it was recounted in the original story, Shara harbors a suspicion she was carefully set up as a scapegoat by a few people working for one of the organizations that received several millions of dollars over the past years.

Both of the young women worked in clerical jobs and both had advanced degrees. Why were they working in such low-pay jobs when they could have had much better salaries somewhere else?

One was married to a man with sullied political connections. The other was married to a guy who’d been unemployed for several years. And yet . . . their cars and homes belied what seemed to be their income levels.

There is a lot more to this story than meets the eye.

But next week Shara will face a judge who will either mete out a slap on the hand — a thousand dollar fine and six months of probation her lawyer had guessed — or serious prison time and a million or two in fines.

In seven days.

If you like my stories and want to read more, please use my referral link! Your $5 monthly membership supports me and other writers on Medium. https://medium.com/@deborah.camp/membership Maybe you’d like to write on Medium and earn a little money too. Either way, here’s my link to get you started: https://medium.com/@deborah.camp/membership