Bielema: Clemency doesn’t fit the crime in Crundwell case

When President Joe Biden announced Thursday he was pardoning 39 people and commuting 1,500 prison sentences – the largest act of clemency in a single day – we were not surprised.

Yes, the sheer number is staggering; but when you step back and realize it came just 12 days after Biden pardoned his son Hunter, who was to be sentenced this month after being convicted at trial on gun charges and pleading guilty to federal charges in a tax case, it wasn’t a shell shocker.

No doubt Biden’s message of giving people second chances and reuniting families by extending clemency is a good one to send over the airwaves when you, as the President, have controversially benefitted from it.

And by your own hand, at that.

But what did catch us off guard was Rita Crundwell, who pleaded guilty to embezzling nearly $54 million from the city of Dixon during her 20-year tenure as Dixon’s city comptroller, was on the list of the 1,500 who’d been granted a commutation. All had earlier been released from prison, some to halfway houses and others to home confinement, under the CARES Act of 2020 to stem COVID-19 outbreaks in penal institutions.

Sentenced in 2013 to 19 years and 7 months in prison and with a 2028 release date set, according to the U.S. Board of Prisons website, Crundwell had served 8 1/2 years in Pekin Correctional Center when she was released from her prison confines in August 2021 to a halfway house program and then to home confinement.

While Crundwell was not pardoned Thursday, Biden’s commutation does release Crundwell from any restrictions.

Since the announcement, we’ve been hearing the same questions: What – other than her earlier release under the CARES Act – qualified Crundwell to be considered for clemency? What is the process? Who reads the cases under consideration? Who makes the decisions?

In a White House press briefing the day of the announcement, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was pressed about how decisions are reached. But her answers weren’t clear. She said Biden certainly made the final decision, but reporters couldn’t get an answer as to the process.

“So, I’m not going to go into step by step of this process,” was Jean-Pierre’s response.

She did say that the U.S. Board of Prisons did play a role just by granting the 1,500 people prison release under the CARES Act and that those released under it demonstrated good behavior. They also had shown that incarceration and at-home confinement had been successful in their rehabilitation.

Our question: Is that enough when your crime is deemed to be the largest municipal theft in U.S. history? Doesn’t that alone make it enough to keep her in prison until she mandatorily completes 85% of her sentence and reaches her 2028 discharge date?

After all, Crundwell’s crime was not a one-off.

It was year after year after year of abusing her duties by stealing money from the same community that was funding her paycheck.

It was running her office so that her thievery wasn’t detected, again, year after year after year.

It was living a blatantly lavish lifestyle in front of the very people who were unknowingly funding it.

Sure, Dixon recovered $40 million in settlements and more than $15 million was repaid from the sale of Crundwell’s horses and other assets, according to an Associated Press report.

Crundwell also is reported to have told a judge, in a handwritten letter describing her various health problems, that she was going to do everything possible to “make up for my mistakes” and “I have taken responsibility for my actions since the first day.”

But when it’s all said and done, her crime’s sentence is not one that should have been waved away in the name of granting a second chance.

Her commutation was a miscarriage of justice and she should have had to the pay the full price in the name of fairness to her victims – the same ones she stole from year, after year, after year.