Dinesh D'Souza Avoids Prison Time, Sentenced To 5 Years Probation

[CatWoman]

(Reuters) - Conservative author and filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza was sentenced on Tuesday to spend eight months in a community confinement center during five years of probation after pleading guilty to a campaign finance law violation.

The defendant, a frequent critic of President Barack Obama, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Richard Berman in Manhattan. He was also given a $30,000 fine and ordered to do one day of community service a week during his probation.

D'Souza, 53, admitted in May to illegally reimbursing two 'straw donors' who donated $10,000 each to the unsuccessful 2012 U.S. Senate campaign in New York of Wendy Long, a Republican he had known since attending Dartmouth College in the early 1980s.

"It was a crazy idea, it was a bad idea," D'Souza told Berman before being sentenced. "I regret breaking the law."

Prosecutors had sought a 10-to 16-month prison sentence, rejecting defense arguments that D'Souza was "ashamed and contrite" about his crime and deserved probation with community service.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/23/dinesh-dsouza-sentenced_n_5869666.html?utm_hp_ref=politics

[Octafish]

1. A fine opportunity to make an example of another GOP election crook wasted.

Hope he looses his voting privileges.

[immoderate]

8. I agree that the POS should do some time...

But voting is a right, not a privilege. Even prisoners should get some voice in who imprisons them, and for what. Some states, and many democracies allow prisoners suffrage.

In a democracy, everybody votes.

--imm

[Octafish]

10. Except in Florida, especially 2000.

The Great Florida Ex-Con Game

Friday, March 1, 2002
by Greg Palast for Harper's Magazine

In November the U.S. media, lost in patriotic reverie, dressed up the Florida recount as a victory for President Bush.

But however one reads the ballots, Bush's win would certainly have been jeopardized had not some Floridians been barred from casting ballots at all. Between May 1999 and Election Day 2000, two Florida secretaries of state - [font color="blue"]Sandra Mortham and Katherine Harris, both protegees of Governor Jeb Bush- ordered 57,700 "ex-felons," who are prohibited from voting by state law, to be removed from voter rolls. (In the thirty-five states where former felons can vote, roughly 90 percent vote Democratic.)[/font color]

A portion of the list, which was compiled for Florida by DBT Online, can be seen for the first time here; DBT, a company now owned by ChoicePoint of Atlanta, was paid $4.3 million for its work, replacing a firm that charged $5,700 per year for the same service. If the hope was that DBT would enable Florida to exclude more voters, then the state appears to have spent its money wisely.

Two of these "scrub lists," as officials called them, were distributed to counties in the months before the election with orders to remove the voters named. Together the lists comprised nearly 1 percent of Florida?s electorate and nearly 3 percent of its African-American voters. Most of the voters (such as "David Butler," (1); a name that appears 77 times in Florida phone books) were selected because their name, gender, birthdate and race matched - or nearly matched - one of the tens of millions of ex-felons in the United States.

Neither DBT nor the state conducted any further research to verify the matches. DBT, which frequently is hired by the F.B.I. to conduct manhunts, originally proposed using address histories and financial records to confirm the names, but the state declined the cross-checks.

In Harris?s elections office files, next to DBT?s sophisticated verification plan, there is a hand-written note: DON'T NEED.

Thomas Alvin Cooper (2), twenty-eight, was flagged because of a crime for which he will be convicted in the year 2007. According to Florida's elections division, this intrepid time-traveler will cover his tracks by moving to Ohio, adding a middle name, and changing his race. Harper's found 325 names on the list with conviction dates in the future, a fact that did not escape Department of Elections workers, who, in June 2000 emails headed, "Future Conviction Dates," termed the discovery, "bad news."

Rather than release this whacky data to skeptical counties, Janet Mudrow, state liaison to DBT, suggested that "blanks would be preferable in these cases." (Harper's counted 4,917 blank conviction dates.) The one county that checked each of the 694 names on its local list could verify only 34 as actual felony convicts. Some counties defied Harris' directives; Madison County's elections supervisor Linda Howell refused the purge list after she found her own name on it.

CONTINUED...

http://www.gregpalast.com/the-great-florida-ex-con-gamernhow-the-felon-voter-purge-was-itself-felonious/

PS: You are correct, immoderate. Voting is a right.

[immoderate]

18. Bingo! I'm in Florida.

I was living in Phoenix for the 2000 election, but I followed the action. I was here by the time Harris imploded. The rules prohibiting felons from voting after release were actually tightened up in 2011. Since the legal and justice systems are weighted against certain people, the result is a similarly tilted voting system. The injustices are cumulative. Shouldn't drug offenders get to vote for legalization?

Maine and Vermont are the only US states where prisoners can vote. The rest vary as to when, if ever, you can be re-enfranchised. Most of Europe, Canada, Japan, some of Africa, allow their prisoners to vote.

Hey did we hijack this thread?

--imm

[WillowTree]

14. That depends on the State laws, I believe.

[immoderate]

17. Exactly. Kind of belies the notion of "inalienable," doesn't it?

--imm

[valerief]

2. Of course, he's a GOPer darling. nt

[NYC_SKP]

3. He joins the ranks of Oliver North and Martha Stewart, while our kids learn that "it's OK".

You know, if you have a following, if you're wealthy or an athlete or the crime isn't about drugs or if you're not a black man or woman.

Woo fucking hoo.

[malthaussen]

6. Oh, the shame is sufficient punishment, doncha know?

It's only animals like you and me who need to be punished by more vigorous means. A white-collar boy like D'Souza has so much more tender sentiments. I'm sure he weeps nightly when contemplating his humiliation.

-- Mal

[Gormy Cuss]

9. Martha Stewart actually went to prison for a short time.

D'Souza is writing a check and doing "community service" that will probably consist of him giving free speeches expounding on his asinine philosophies.

[riqster]

4. Showing that crime pays if you are rich and a Repub.

[JustAnotherGen]

5. It's not fair

It's just not fair.

[Louisiana1976]

13. Right on!

[hifiguy]

7. This crawling shit belongs in the Big House.

[surrealAmerican]

11. What is a "community confinement center"?

That sounds kind of like a prison.

[BillZBubb]

12. D'Sousa should be praising "soft on crime, liberal judges" now.

He got a slap on the wrist.

[wandy]

15. Predictable. n/t

[progressoid]

16. I'm shocked.

Shocked that he got that much.