They should have been fired for obstruction of justice, but not prosecuted for shooting the fleeing felon.
Do you think Sutton was intending to prosecute the Mexican doper?
What you have is sloppy paperwork by people not otherwise required to file paperwork.
Now USPS might fire a window clerk for coming up short a buck and a half (and I've seen that), but counting empty shell casings is not quite in the same category (which I can explain to you if you have half an hour or so).
This is much more like the situation I encountered about 15 years ago when the US attorney prosecuting a mailer had a Postal Inspector call me and ask what the value was of a postal mailing statement (Form 3602).
They had just gotten to the sentencing phase and this guy had been on trial for stealing blank mailing statements.
Since I was the fellow who certified ordering them for nationwide use (and ran the budget for all the forms the mailing public might ever run into) I knew the price. My response was to ask the PI "How many did he take" and the PI said, "well, it's a whole stack ~ maybe a hundred or so".
That'd cost us maybe 37 cents ~ .
The US attorney handling the prosecution about went out of his nut and threatened mayhem. Calls were precipitated to top management, etc., etc.
Sure some mixed wires there.
The guy walked, but not after spending some serious change defending himself from some idiots. I don't know if he ever went after his expenses, but he should have.
BTW, then, as now, USPS policy has been to give them away like water. Never could figure out how this guy ended up getting prosecuted for taking some.
The Sutton case has elements of the USPS 3602 case ~ right down to the crazy prosecutor and the careless investigator.
I think the business about counting the shell casings has to do with justifying government payment for ammunition used in "official business" (to wit, shooting at perps). The penalty would be for the officer to moxie up some bucks to reimburse the government for its lost ammunition ~ and then most likely only when the guy retires, or leaves for some other LE job.
A federale here can probably take us through the daisy chain of accounting for ammunition. Pretty sure "obstruction of justice" would come about if and only if the LEO attempted to change the official record regarding how many rounds he'd been issued out of company stores.
Hmmm. There's probably some guy who still hasn't closed the books on personal accountability for the ammo lost when the Murrah building went up. Wonder if Sutton's counterpart in that district is going to use the deficiencies to prosecute somebody else someday.