Posted on 09/06/2019 10:42:50 PM PDT by Impala64ssa
as prosecutors call for actress to spend just ONE MONTH in jail after she pleaded guilty in admissions scandal
Felicity Huffman has been recommended to spend just one month in jail in connection to the college admissions scandal where she pleaded guilty in April to mail fraud and honest services fraud.
The actress wrote in a letter delivered to a Boston judge on Friday that believed she was giving her daughter with a learning disability a 'fair shot' by paying $15,000 for a SAT test to be corrected to help Sophia gain entry to the University of Southern California.
After prosecutors originally called for Huffman to spend between four and 10 months locked up, the recommendation filed Friday by the U.S. Attorney's office asked for her to be jailed for 30 days.
Following her time inside, Huffman, 56, will be on supervised released for a year if prosecutors - who described her acts as 'deliberate and manifestly criminal' - get their way.
'In the context of this case, neither probation nor home confinement (in a large home in the Hollywood Hills with an infinity pool) would constitute meaningful punishment or deter others from committing similar crimes,' prosecutors wrote to the judge about Huffman, who is married to 69-year-old Shameless star William H. Macy.
Felicity is mother to daughters Sophia, 19, and Georgia, 17, and admitted to paying for a proctor to correct wrong answers on Sophia's exams.
Huffman routed her payment though admissions official Singer via his nonprofit Key Worldwide Foundation; prosecutors said the aforementioned foundation was set up as a front to accept payoffs.
Prosecutors added: 'Her efforts weren't driven by need or desperation, but by a sense of entitlement, or at least moral cluelessness, facilitated by wealth and insularity'.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Like it or not the colleges do still have knowledge that people need, so it’s not like you can just say a pox on all their houses and hit the library. My problem is that between work, school, family, there’s pretty much no time to hit the library or for side projects. The biggest benefit is the professors themselves, fellow students, and the textbooks. I’ll be honest and say that the “too socially desirable to fail” athletes and others that I got stuck with in group projects seem very unlikely to fall into the asset category later. They just take your work and move on without a backward glance, like they are entitled to it.
Believe me, any vaguely deserving kids from the ghetto get their choice of Ivy League college.
She’s taking the opportunity from some white Joe-close-to-Average.
But lots of parents of kids in wealthy communities actually feel this way, because colleges will only take so many from their zip codes or high schools, and they have more smart and prepared kids to compete against there than if the kids had grown up elsewhere.
The problem is threefold here:
1) the taxpayers dish over massive funding to most colleges,
2) others in the private sector aren’t allowed to discriminate in hiring or in serving the public, and
3) too many of those Chinese “students” are actually spies.
Actually pretty much all the knowledge colleges have can be found in libraries.
What they have and many need is a credential for a particular professional field.
She pleaded guilty to one count of "conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services mail fraud."
I'll bet most Americans have never even heard of such a thing.
For what it's worth, the term "honest services mail fraud" is a "crime" that occurs when someone engages in some kind of dishonesty where the victim can't even demonstrate any kind of tangible loss. This was one of the charges brought against the various "Russian hackers" by Robert Mueller's team of prosecutors ... which ought to tell you exactly how idiotic the "crime" is.
For what it's worth ... all of us who post on Free Republic using a screen name instead of our real names could probably be charged with this same "crime."
I agree with all of your points ... which is exactly why nobody should ever face any legal consequences for engaging in blatant misrepresentations to get into those schools.
I’m not sure I’m with you on that conclusion. If people sign to something at risk of prosecution for fraud, I don’t see why they shouldn’t be held to it.
“The system” altogether of course should be changed.
Does she not get the irony in that statement? Cheating = fair. OMG.
The university could never make a legal case that it was defrauded, since the "undeserving" student actually paid the full cost of attending the school.
No, fraud isn’t based on a promise that you will be admitted according to your idea of fair criteria; it is based on vouching for something that isn’t so. Colleges don’t actually make promises along the lines you describe. But they have their applicants vouch for the information they provide in their applications.
The law is pretty straightforward here.
So preferring sports is a disability,as is laziness? That tells me stupid lazy kids are getting into college and learning nothing.This is buying diplomas and putting incompetent people into the workplace. And its been going on for a long time. Hope your doctor didnt buy his MD.
The first thing I did was determine was exactly constitutes "fraud" in legal terms. If you do this, you'll likely find some variation of this definition (from USLegal.com):
Fraud is generally defined in the law as an intentional misrepresentation of material existing fact made by one person to another with knowledge of its falsity and for the purpose of inducing the other person to act, and upon which the other person relies with resulting injury or damage.
The highlighted item in that definition is mine. I highlighted it because it undermines many of the cases that are prosecuted for "honest services fraud." In the case of a person who willfully provides misleading information to a college on an application for admissions, this begs the question: Who, exactly, has suffered some kind of injury or damage?
This is not an inconsequential point I raise. In fact, the lack of any "injury or damage" was the legal basis for the U.S. Supreme Court decision in United States v. Alvarez, which overturned a key provision of the Stolen Valor Act of 2005. In effect, the court ruled that absent any fraud, the First Amendment protects outright lies and false claims as "speech."
As a result of this decision, the Stolen Valor Act of 2013 was passed which included a provision that stated the Act was only applicable in cases where the defendant gained something of value by fraud. The 2013 law was effectively meaningless because these cases could already be prosecuted under existing fraud statutes.
Now let's move on to "honest services fraud," which apparently involves cases where no damages of any kind actually occur.
The American Bar Association published an interesting article outlining some serious concerns about the Federal law as it is written:
Honest Services Fraud: You May Already Be Guilty!
The crux of the problem for the ABA is that the applicable Federal statute is so broad and vague that it can be used to prosecute just about anyone. They even cite a number of cases where Justice Antonin Scalia wrote at length about the dangers this statute present to Americans. The law as it is written could turn a person who lies about his birthday just to get a piece of cake and a "Happy Birthday!" serenade from the staff at a local restaurant into a felon.
This is the provision of the Federal statute that the ABA found so problematic:
For the purposes of this chapter, the term "scheme or artifice to defraud" includes a scheme or artifice to deprive another of the intangible right of honest services.
The ABA is right. What the hell is an "intangible right of honest services?"
If you sign a contract with an agreed penulty for misrepresentation you can be liable for that—which is nothing akin to your birthday cake example.
And there are all kinds of ways a college can claim harm for signing, say, a team athlete who can’t play the sport or just any student who brings down the quality of the student body or doesn’t diversify it in some way they are seeking. A whole lot of damage from that? Probably not.
But don’t the charges in these college cases include commercial bribery that via wire communications or otherwise crossing state lines falls under federal purview? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_bribery
I might add, however, that given all the Deep State, massive crime in DC itself, I see no reason for the Feds to go trawling to this kind of backwater to prosecute, however.
It is akin to the prosecution back in the day of Martha Stewart—while the Bushes, Clinton, Obama, Mueller, Barr, etc., still all go free.
In the case of a college application, the penalty is what? The college cannot unilaterally declare that a misrepresentation is a criminal act ... so this would have to be a civil matter, not a criminal one. But keep in mind that the applicant pays a fee to the college, so there is no "duty of care" relationship that would apply like you would see in a customer-business transaction. If anything, the college has a duty to the applicants that is not clearly reciprocated by the applicants (as I read it).
And there are all kinds of ways a college can claim harm for signing, say, a team athlete who can’t play the sport or just any student who brings down the quality of the student body or doesn’t diversify it in some way they are seeking.
You can throw "diversity" out the window because it's impossible to quantify it, or (more importantly) to quantify the financial benefits of it. And the case of a student who misrepresented his or her athletic skills would never hold up in a court of law, since this would be a classic example of a plaintiff failing to take steps to protect its own interests by scouting the student before signing a commitment letter.
The commercial bribery angle might be more applicable than any other, but the link you posted seems to undermine it: "There is no federal statute that by its terms expressly prohibits commercial bribery generally."
You needed to keep reading. From the link:
“However, the federal mail and wire fraud statutes [9] can be used to prosecute commercial bribery as a “scheme or artifice to defraud” if the mail or interstate wire facilities are used. In addition, use of the mails or interstate travel or communication in furtherance of a violation of state commercial bribery laws may be prosecutable in Federal court under the Travel Act.[10] As the penalties under the federal statutes may exceed the state penalties, and the federal investigative and enforcement agencies may have superior resources, often federal prosecution is favored.”
I disagree. There are only so many slots in colleges for students to take, especially in the medical field. The US Government has a hand in this as well. It may not matter to you who gets that slot, but it does to Americans whose taxes have paid into that system for decades.
If you look at Harvard’s incoming class, it’s clear Harvard has preferences. The incoming class is:
30% minority
25% Asian
16% first generation to go to college
They didn’t give data on how many whites were accepted
Where do they come from:
22% mid Atlantic
20% south
2% central
3% mountain
13% international
If you’re a white kid from a flyover state you’re not what they’re looking for - even with perfect SAT scores
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/03/harvard-college-admits-1950-to-class-of-23/
https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics
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