Woman convicted of perjury seeks a commutation
By Shelley Murphy, Globe Staff | July 11, 2007
She has no friends in the White House. She describes herself as a regular, middle-class American who works, pays her taxes, and is devoted to her two young children.
But Joanne "Jody" Richardson, 41, of Tyngsborough, has plenty in common with I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff.
Like Libby, Richardson was convicted of perjury for lying to a federal grand jury. Both have careers that have been ruined and families that have suffered from the public ordeal of a trial.
Yet, while President Bush commuted Libby's 30-month prison term last week, calling it excessive, the government is fighting to send Richardson, a former account manager for a pharmaceutical company, to prison.
Federal prosecutors in Boston are urging an appeals court to overrule a judge who tossed out Richardson's six-month prison term in March and ordered her resentenced.
"I was mad that he would be able to get his prison sentence to go away when I had been fighting for five years," said Richardson, who is urging the government to look at the circumstances of her case, just as Bush did for Libby. "People like me go to prison every day, and people like him don't."
In a letter to US Attorney Michael J. Sullivan's office this week, Richardson's lawyers, Max D. Stern and Alexandra H. Deal, urged prosecutors to drop their appeal and recommend probation for Richardson. They said that Richardson, who is caring for her father while he battles lung cancer, is more deserving of a break than Libby. Unlike Libby, she was acquitted of obstruction of justice, and her case involved healthcare fraud, not national security.
"It remains to be seen whether there are two systems of government here, one for the friends of the president and the vice president, and the other for the powerless people," Stern said.
Sullivan issued a statement yesterday, saying, "The president's exercise of his commutation authority in an unrelated matter has no bearing on this case." He said his office will review Stern's request.
In January 2004, Richardson, a former account manager at TAP Pharmaceutical Products Inc., was found guilty of lying in 2000 to a federal grand jury that was investigating allegations that TAP offered kickbacks, often in the form of education and research grants, to doctors and hospitals to get them to prescribe the company's prostate cancer-fighting drug Lupron and the antacid Prevacid.
She was convicted a year after TAP paid a record $885 million federal fine to settle similar charges.
US District Judge William G. Young sentenced Richardson to six months in prison, followed by four months of house arrest, and fined her $3,000. A federal appeals court upheld her conviction.
But in March, Young tossed out Richardson's sentencing, ruling that her previous lawyer had made errors while arguing her appeal.
Stern said Richardson was scared, confused, and unprepared by her former lawyer when she testified before the grand jury. She "got tripped up," he said, when trying to explain that she didn't believe she or her colleagues had done anything wrong.
No one has served time in the case. In July 2004, a jury acquitted eight current and former TAP employees, of conspiring to defraud Medicaid and Medicare by paying bribes and kickbacks to hospitals and doctors. Defense lawyers had argued at trial that members of TAP's sales force were trying to follow confusing drug-marketing rules and did not believe they were breaking the law. Charges against several others were dismissed, and one person was sentenced to probation.
Libby was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in March for lying to FBI agents and a grand jury investigating who leaked the name of a CIA operative.
In announcing the commutation, Bush said Libby's reputation had been forever damaged and "his wife and young children have also suffered immensely."
Wiping away tears during an interview in her lawyer's office this week, Richardson said her life went into a tailspin after her indictment in 2002 and she worries about the impact it will have on her 10-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son if she goes to prison.
"To me, my number one goal has always been to protect my children," said Richardson, who said it has been a struggle to keep her family together and pay the bills.
After her indictment, Richardson said she was fired from the $170,000-a-year job she had taken at another pharmaceutical company. Her husband, formerly a stay-at-home dad, went back to work.
She now earns $40,000 a year doing marketing work for a trade organization, and her husband is breaking even at a carpet cleaning business he launched after her indictment. She has a degree in clinical laboratory sciences, but as a result of her conviction, she said the government has barred her from working anywhere that accepts Medicare or Medicaid funds.
She loves to cheer her children on at their wrestling matches and basketball and football games. But she said she's reluctant to volunteer at school or sporting events because it means submitting to a criminal background check, which reveals her conviction and brings "a stigma," awkward questions, and possible embarrassment for her children.
"I'm just a regular person who wants to work at my job, make ends meet, and spend time with my kids," Richardson said. "I just want to keep my family together, and if I go to prison, it's not going to be easy to do that."
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