Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

President Biden on Thursday commuted the prison sentence of Michael Conahan, a former judge who pleaded guilty to sending juvenile defendants to two private, for-profit detention centers in exchange for $2.1 million in kickbacks.

The 72-year-old judge pleaded guilty to racketeering conspiracy charges in 2011 and was sentenced to 17.5 years in prison for the “Kids-for-Cash” scheme.

He has been in home confinement in Florida under federal supervision since June 2020, when he requested a “compassionate release” because of the Covid-19 pandemic, arguing he was “in grave danger of not only contracting the virus, but of dying from the virus.”

Conahan, whose commutation was first reported by the Citizens’ Voice, was one of 1,499 commutations Biden granted this week. Biden, who also issued 49 pardons, far exceeded the previous single-day record for acts of clemency, which was held by former President Barack Obama, who issued 330 acts of clemency in a single day before he left office in 2017.

“The nearly 1,500 individuals who received commutations today have been serving their sentences at home for at least one year under the COVID-era CARES Act,” the White House said in a statement. “These Americans have been reunited with their families and shown their commitment to rehabilitation by securing employment and advancing their education.”

Former attorney Robert Powell paid $770,000 to Conahan and former judge Mark Ciavarella Jr. to reward the judges for sending juvenile defendants to two private, for-profit detention centers Powell partly owned, oftentimes with sentences that were incongruent with the juveniles’ crimes.

Ciavarella was sentenced to 28 years in prison and is scheduled to be released in 2034.

Powell served an 18-month prison sentence in connection with the scheme after pleading guilty to felony counts of failing to report a felony and being an accessory to a conspiracy. He also agreed to pay the juvenile defendants affected by the scheme more than $6 million in a settlement reached in 2015.

Real estate developer Robert Mericle paid another $2.1 million to the judges. He served one year in federal prison on charges related to failing to disclose to investigators and a grand jury that he knew the judges were defrauding the government by failing to report the money on their taxes.

A mother whose son died by suicide while serving time in the juvenile detention under the scheme called Biden’s decision “deeply painful.”

I bet.

President Joe Biden granted clemency to nearly 1,500 Americans this week, including to a former doctor convicted of Medicare fraud for providing diluted chemotherapy drugs to cancer patients.

The commutations, which the White House is lauded as “the largest single-day grant of clemency in modern history,” has drawn significant criticism as some of those on the list have been reported on. According to a report from The Washington Free Beacon, several recipients were involved in serious offenses.

Meera Sachdeva, a Mississippi doctor, was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2012 for defrauding Medicare and was required to reimburse $8.2 million to her former cancer facility. Sachdeva provided cancer patients with diluted chemotherapy drugs. She also provided them with old needles, which resulted in one patient claiming to have gotten HIV from a needle used by her clinic.

Snip.

Other recipients of clemency included Daniel Fillerup, an Alabama physician sentenced to 10 years in prison for illegally distributing fentanyl that resulted in a fatal overdose. The Department of Justice said that Fillerup “directly contributed to the opioid epidemic.” Also included was Wendy Hechtman, who was serving 15 years for leading a drug ring linked to a surge in overdose deaths in Nebraska in 2017.

Opioid drug ring leaders. Sounds like just the sort of fine, upstanding citizens you should issue a pardons to.

Forget clemency. She’s lucky she still has her kneecaps…

Included in the list of inmates Biden released who had been placed under home confinement during the COVID-19 pandemic was Rita Crundwell, the former comptroller of Dixon, Illinois, who was convicted in 2013 and sentenced to nearly 20 years behind bars for stealing nearly $54 million from the town of 15,000 people over two decades.

Crundwell, now 71, admitted to embezzling from the city of Dixon during her time as comptroller, using the stolen funds to support a lavish lifestyle, which included bankrolling her horse breeding operation, purchasing real estate, and buying more than four dozen vehicles and a luxury motor home.

Let ye who has never embezzled $54 million in taxpayer money to run a horse-breeding farm cast the first stone. (Hat tip: Dwight.)

Bloom, 59, was sentenced to 14 years in prison in 2015. At the time, Patch reported Bloom’s case was the largest financial fraud case ever prosecuted in the Federal Court of Chicago. His firm collapsed in 2007. Bloom’s sentence was to end in May 2026 reports Chicago Tribune.

Bloom was convicted in 2014 of 18 counts of wire fraud and one count of investment adviser fraud after a four-week trial in U.S. District Court. Between January 2003 and August 2007, Bloom fraudulently obtained and retained under management more than $1 billion of customers’ funds.

Mr. Bloom obviously took the advice to “never steal anything small” to heart.

One might almost admire the sheer brazen criminality and no-fucks-to-give audacity of Dark Brandon shamelessly pardoning so many big-time crooks, were it not for the distinct possibility that he wasn’t even aware of who he was pardoning, and the same cabal who have been running his White House are the ones who have actually been racking off the bribes for selling presidential indulgences…