Wealthy parents who admitted to taking part in the biggest college admissions scandal in U.S. history must go to prison, if only for a matter of months, the Justice Department said, rejecting their proposals for alternative punishments a week before the first sentencing.
The actor Felicity Huffman, among the most prominent parents caught in the government’s sting, should serve one month behind bars and pay a $20,000 fine for hiring the scam’s leader to boost her older daughter’s SAT score, federal prosecutors said in a court filing yesterday. Huffman will face a judge on Friday.
Home confinement for the parents “would be a penological joke conjuring images of defendants padding around impressive homes,” and community service is “too easily co-opted for its ‘PR’ value,” according to the sentencing recommendations from the U.S. attorney’s office in Massachusetts.
“For wrongdoing that is predicated on wealth and rationalized by a sense of privilege, incarceration is the only leveler: in prison everyone is treated the same, dressed the same, and intermingled regardless of affluence, position or fame,” prosecutors told the court in the memo.
The government “got what they wanted with Felicity Huffman,” said Brad Simon, a former federal prosecutor in New York who is now a partner at Phillips Nizer LLP and isn’t involved in the case. “They got an early guilty plea from a high-profile celebrity, and now they’re going to claim a big victory if she gets a sentence of one month in jail or less.”
Huffman, who won an Emmy for her work in the ABC hit “Desperate Housewives” and a Golden Globe for the movie “Transamerica,” was “deliberate and manifestly criminal” in her dealings with the corrupt college counselor and ringleader William “Rick” Singer, prosecutors told U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in the filing. Huffman’s daughter got a 1420 out of 1600 on the SAT, an improvement of about 400 points over the preliminary SAT she took on her own a year earlier.
Huffman’s defense attorneys said in their own filing Friday that the actor is “deeply remorseful” and deserves probation and 250 hours of community service rather than prison time.
Federal sentencing guidelines, which judges consult in meting out punishment, are driven by the dollar amounts of economic harm. If the sum is relatively low — in Huffman’s case, $15,000, compared to hundreds of thousands of dollars for some other parents — it could mean a minimal term. Huffman’s lawyers argued she should face as little as no prison time at all.
“What I think is happening is they’re recognizing that the judge is not going to give her much time,” Simon said.
Neither a lawyer for Huffman nor the U.S. attorney’s office responded to requests for comment on the filing.
The government has charged 34 parents in the scandal. The sentencing memo included recommendations for 11 of the 15 who have pleaded guilty to fraud conspiracy for paying Singer to get their kids into elite schools from Stanford to Yale. The charge carries a maximum term of 20 years in prison, though the federal guidelines can bring that number down significantly for parents who acknowledge their crime, have a clean record and meet other criteria.
That leaves 19 parents who chose not to seek plea deals, were indicted on money-laundering charges and are fighting it out. Singer, who has admitted to leading the sprawling operation out of his once legitimate college-counseling firm, The Key, pleaded guilty to racketeering and is cooperating in the prosecution.
As the U.S. has laid out the scheme, the Newport Beach, California, college admissions strategist took thousands of dollars from affluent clients to fix their children’s entrance exam scores. Upping the ante, the government says, he funneled through a charity he’d set up hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes for college athletic coaches to put the kids on recruiting rosters, assuring them of places in elite schools across the country, including the University of Southern California and Georgetown University. None of the colleges or students have been charged.
Some of the proposed punishments in the prosecutors’ memo are less severe than the plea agreements called for, while others are the same. The longest prison sentence the government is seeking for the 11 parents is 15 months, for Agustin Huneeus, who spent $300,000 on the racket, and Stephen Semprevivo, who spent $400,000, according to prosecutors. Their plea deals called for 21 to 27 months each.
In a plea deal worked out just weeks after Huffman was charged in March, prosecutors said they’d recommend she serve four to 10 months.
Lawyers for the parents who have proclaimed their innocence of the charges see a weak case. Some have signaled they will rely on a 1946 Supreme Court case, Kotteakos v. U.S., in which the government’s fatal flaw was to have charged a single conspiracy — as it has in the college scandal — when the alleged conspirators knew the kingpin but not one another.
Others argue they wrote checks to Singer’s charitable foundation in good faith, as it was established to provide educational opportunities to disadvantaged kids. Still others will hold up the long tradition of prestigious universities giving special attention to the children of generous donors, in full compliance with the law. And some will mount all three defenses, or others.
What Simon, the Phillips Nizer partner, sees in the sentencing memo for the parents who made plea deals is the government, six months out from its dramatic revelation of the charges, getting real.
Of Huffman, one of the first to plead guilty, he said, “If they come to court demanding a long sentence, the judge is going to come down on them. Recognizing that, they’re trying to get a little pound of flesh — a month in jail, here — so they can say they’re tough, but also trying to save face in court.”
Prosecutors’ insistence on prison time has the government at odds with its own Probation and Pretrial Services office, which has advised against increasing parents’ sentences based on alleged financial harm to the colleges or on the size of the bribes. On Tuesday, Talwani will hold an unusual public hearing on the issue.
Huffman’s husband, the TV and movie star William H. Macy, sent Judge Talwani a six-page letter explaining his wife’s parenting challenges and the impact her arrest had on their children. An arts school had offered their daughter a finalist’s audition but withdrew it two days after Huffman was taken out of their home in handcuffs, he said.
“She hurt her daughters. It was the one thing she swore never to do, and she did it,” Macy wrote. “It’s a great lump of pain that she carries with her night and day. It’s a pain I don’t think she will ever escape.”
Now she is trying to rebuild their relationship, he wrote.
“When one of her daughters needs to scream at her, she takes it in and makes no excuses. She only loves them back,” he told the judge. He closed by saying, “Every good thing in my life is because of Felicity Huffman.”
In her own letter to the judge, Huffman described her struggle with motherhood and how she got in deeper with Singer after working with him legitimately for a year on improving her younger daughter’s college application.
“As warped as this sounds now, I honestly began to feel that maybe I would be a bad mother if I didn’t do what Mr. Singer was suggesting,” Huffman told Talwani. She said she feels “deep and abiding shame” over her crime but is “truly grateful for the lessons I have learned and for the opportunity to live more honestly.”
This article provided by Bloomberg News.
