A "Massachusetts woman on Biden’s clemency list was sentenced for ‘lethal’ fentanyl trafficking conspiracy," according to the Boston Herald. She led a "large-scale criminal enterprise that reaped hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits and caused untold misery."
"Former Dixon Comptroller Rita Crundwell stole $53 million from the little town, a crime so notorious that a documentary was made -- highlighting that she perpetrated the largest case of municipal fraud in American history," reports Politico.
Perhaps most incredibly, the "Cash for Kids" judge in Pennsylvania who wrongly sent dozens of minors to a for-profit prison and got kickbacks for it, was released without any examination of the facts of his case.
"The White House commuted the sentence of the judge at the center of a notorious 'kids-for-cash' scandal without considering the specifics of his case, beyond whether it fit into a broad set of criteria," reports Politico. We can assume the rest of the cases of the 1500 prisoners were also examined just as thoroughly.
The governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, strongly disagreed with Biden's decision to commute the sentence of former judge Michael Conahan, who was convicted in 2011 and sentenced to 17 years, only to be released to house arrest during the pandemic.
“I do feel strongly that President Biden got it absolutely wrong and created a lot of pain here in northeastern Pennsylvania,” Shapiro, a Democrat, said at an event on Friday. Conahan, he said, “deserves to be behind bars, not walking as a free man.”
The mother of one teen wrongly sentenced by Conahan who then committed suicide, Sandy Fonzo, said she was “shocked…and hurt” by Biden's clemency.
“Conahan‘s actions destroyed families, including mine, and my son‘s death is a tragic reminder of the consequences of his abuse of power,” Fonzo told a local publication. “This pardon feels like an injustice for all of us who still suffer. Right now I am processing and doing the best I can to cope with the pain that this has brought back.”
Rita Crundwell, the Dixon, Illinois comptroller who stole $54 million to fund a lavish lifestyle of expensive homes, dream vacations, and some serious bling, was sentenced to 20 years. She served less than half that time.
“With my deteriorating health condition and the danger of the Covid 19 pandemic, I feel like I have been given a death sentence,” she wrote to the judge, asking to be released during the pandemic.
Chicago's WGN reported Thursday:
The judge denied release but the following year the Bureau of Prisons put her on home confinement even though she had only served less than half her sentence.
Former US Marshal Jason Wojdylo met with Crundwell in prison several times as he worked to sell her assets.
“She conveyed to me more of a sense of disgust that she had been sentenced that long,” he said back in 2021. “She was very visibly shaken by the fact she was serving a nearly 20 year sentence.”
So she's not sorry about her crime. Shouldn't "remorse" have been one of the top criteria Biden should have looked at?
With Biden's mania for being "the first, "the best," "the biggest," and "the most," it's not surprising that he and his aides gave little thought to the specifics of the cases, as long as they "fit into a broad set of criteria" for release.
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