Los Angeles nun, 80, gets prison for $835,000 school theft

[left-of-center2012]

An 80-year-old nun who admitted stealing $835,000 from a Torrance elementary school asked a federal judge on Monday to show mercy and spare her from prison. “I have sinned, I have broken the law, and I have no excuses,” Sister Mary Margaret Kreuper, the former principal of St. James Catholic School, told the judge. She called her crimes “a violation of my vows, the commandments, the law, and above all the sacred trust that so many had placed in me.”

Kreuper, who retired in 2018 after 28 years as the school’s principal, pleaded guilty in July to wire fraud and money laundering, confessing that she stole tuition checks, spent much of the money on casino outings with friends and tried to cover up the embezzlement. The stolen money could have covered a decade of tuition for 14 students at a school that lacked money for field trips or new books and classroom supplies, prosecutors said.

In a memo to the judge, prosecutors cited letters from parents and students, including one from a 12-year-old saying Kreuper was “just like any other robber.”

Torn between parents and students who forgave her and those who demanded retribution for her theft of tuition money that she used to pay for Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe vacations, U.S. District Judge Otis D. Wright II acknowledged his own anguish in finding a punishment to fit the crime. He settled on one year and a day in prison.

long article at https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-02-07/nun-sentenced-embezzlement-torrance-school-kreuper

P.S.
Rightly or wrongly (?) my understanding is if she were sentenced to one year in prison she could get out early. But sentenced to one year and a day she has to do the full sentence.

[Celerity]

1. glad they added the 1 day, so she does the full length

[Skittles]

2. ugh

people who defraud like this are disgusting but it is especially egregious when they do it while living a sanctimonious lifestyle

[RockRaven]

3. One of the things that I find to be rather bullshit about any angst about the correct sentence

here is the fact that this was in no fucking way an impulsive crime. It was a systematic, sustained, long-term pattern of discrete crimes.

Any babble about forgiveness or sin is irrelevant bullshit. Sorry, the criminal justice system should not be indulging your cosmic fan fiction in their decision making processes (take a minute to consider the desirability of involving other random/unknown people's cosmic fan fiction in your court cases before you insist that it should be so).

[SergeStorms]

4. I was going to say, "it's always the quiet ones"....

but then.........Trump. He blows every old adage right out of the water. They broke the mold after they made Donnie (thank goodness for that).

[NJCher]

5. Another one bites the dust

I laughed at the kid’s assessment: she’s just like any ole robber.

[NanananaFatman]

6. Screw that.

This is why religious thinking is dangerous and damaging.

She stole from kids. From kids. Almost a million bucks so she could gamble in Vegas. Gotta wonder how much went to hookers and blow.

And the judge soft walked a major crime because why? Because she’s a nun? Fuck that. Because she said she was sorry? Double fuck that. Because she begged for mercy which is the negation of justice? Triple fuck that.

That judge is infested with religious thinking and need a brain enema. And disbarment. And prison time.

Fuck all this privileged white shit.