By: WISCONSIN LAW JOURNAL STAFF//November 15, 2013//
United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit
Criminal
Sentencing — reasonableness
Where a city comptroller embezzled $53 million from the city, a 235-month sentence is not unreasonable.
“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.(Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall received about $400,000,worth $5.3 million in current dollars.) 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.”
Affirmed.
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Reinhard, J., Easterbrook, J.