Sherri Papini.
Sherri Papini, the mother of two who ignited a massive search after her husband reported that she’d been kidnapped while jogging near her rural California home in 2016 but wascharged last weekwith making up the entire story, wasreleased this weekon a $120,000 bail.
Papini is facing charges of making false statements to a federal officer and mail fraud, and she could get up to 20 years in prison if she is convicted.
Legal experts doubt she’ll get that long a sentence; most think she’d likely take a plea bargain that could result in anything from home detention to up to two years in prison for her alleged crimes.
“It’s not murder and it’s not armed robbery, but those are serious crimes,” Los Angeles–based defense attorney David Ring tells PEOPLE. “You can go to prison for mail fraud and for making a false statement to a government official. She’s going to have to decide if she accepts those charges or if she’s going to fight it.”
Either way, Ring believes prosecutors will seek jail time.
“She misled the public,” he says. “She created hysteria in that community that there was a kidnapping. You don’t just get to say, ‘Oh gee, I’m sorry.’ And the government says, ‘Okay, I’ll forgive it.’ They’re not just going to let her apologize and move on with her life. No way.”
Sherri and Keith Papini.Courtesy Keith Papini
“I think the community and the public would be outraged if they gave her a slap on the wrist like that,” he adds. “She basicallyaccused Hispanic women of kidnapping herand denigrated the Hispanic community with those allegations. It’s outrageous.”
Laurie Levenson, a professor at Loyola Law School, says it might be in Papini’s best interest to accept a plea deal.
“I think probably whoever represents her is going to have to dig down deep to see why she put together this [alleged] scheme and ask for leniency on that basis,” she adds. “The question is, why did she commit it? And how much should she be punished for?”
Ring says if Papini is offered a deal and she turns it down and “the case proceeds to trial, and if she’s found guilty, the punishment is usually much, much more than what the prosecutors offered her,” says Ring. “So, that’s the risk she runs of rolling the dice to go to trial.”
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“Jussie Smollettis a similar case,” says former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani. “It’s a false reporting type case. But if it wasn’t Jussie Smollett, and he didn’t take the case to trial and lie and continue to lie at sentencing, he probably wouldn’t havegotten five months in jail. So, you get a lot less time in state court, especially a very liberal jurisdiction like Chicago, than he would in federal court. So, had Jussie Smollett just admitted it, he probably would’ve gotten probation, but he lied. And there was a lot of pressure on this judge to sentence him to jail.”
Whether or not Papini faces jail time will ultimately be up to a federal judge, adds Rahmani.
“The judge looks at different factors,” he says, including the circumstances and seriousness of the crime and the history and characteristics of the defendant. “Ultimately, judges have complete and total discretion to impose sentences. They really have a lot of power.”
“There’s a lot of eyes and ears on [the Papini] case and people want to see justice served,” says Rahmani. “So, there’s going to be a lot of law enforcement pressure. It’s gotten a lot of attention, she’s the newGone Girl.”
Experts say that even if Papini is sentenced to home detention or jail time, she will most likely have to pay a significant amount in restitution to the state for petitioning for more than $30,000 from the California victims assistance fund, as well as for the amount law enforcement spent trying to solve the case. Shasta County Sheriff Michael Johnson has said that the government spent more than $150,000 investigating Papini’s disappearance.
“By statute, you have to order restitution when there’s victims of crime and the government here is the victim of the crime, so no question,” says Rahmani. “They’re going to have to file, as victims, they’re going to file the restitution paperwork and it’s going to outline all these law enforcement agent hours, police, officer hours, sheriffs. They’re going to itemize all that and the judge is going to order that. And she’s going to have to pay that and pay it over some period.”
The fact that she is a mother of young children won’t make a difference, says Ring.
source: people.com
