A Republican sheriff in South Carolina, a deep red state, was reamed out by a judge after being convicted — and sentenced to 41 months in prison — for a torrent of corrupt behavior.
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“South Carolina ex-sheriff Chuck Wright of Spartanburg County was sentenced Tuesday to the maximum recommended sentence — 41 months in prison,” reported The State’s John Monk. “The sentence to Wright, 61, by U.S. Judge Timothy Cain was delivered before a packed courtroom at the Greenville federal courthouse. In the audience were FBI and State Law Enforcement Division agents. The hearing lasted more than three hours.”
Monk then quoted Cain, who was appointed by President Barack Obama but was a former law associate of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), harshly denouncing Wright.
“Over time, the defendant did not honor his oath,” Cain told Wright and the rest of the courtroom regarding the former sheriff’s extensive theft. In addition to the lengthy sentence, which Cain said he hopes will deter other wrongdoers in the police department, he also forced Wright to pay $462,866 in restitution for the money he stole through his office.
“I wish the guidelines would have been more because Chuck Wright deserved more,” Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott said after the sentencing. “He was a total embarrassment, not only to sheriffs, but to all law enforcement in the state. For anyone who wears the badge, he betrayed them all.”
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Wright was proved to have stolen $89,000 from his police department’s Benevolence Fund charity, as well as to charge the government for thousands of dollars worth of personal items. Additionally, Wright bullied employees to give him prescription drugs like oxycodone that they or their families were taking legally and put a cousin on his payroll for a $57,000-per-year job in which he did not do anything. Because he had so much power and was proved to have abused it, Cain sentenced him to the greatest extent legally possible, even though traditionally he would not have been given the maximum potential legal punishment.
“Sentences for nonviolent federal crimes are usually much less than the 41 months that Wright wound up getting, even though he hired two experienced criminal defense lawyers to organize and plead his case in the most sympathetic manner possible,” Monk reported on Tuesday.
“On the surface, Chuck Wright was the squeaky-clean sheriff of Spartanburg County, one of South Carolina’s largest and most prosperous areas,” Monk wrote for The State on Monday. “He had risen from deputy to the county’s most popular elected official, and he oversaw a department of 600-plus deputies, detention officers and civilian staff. But beneath the above-reproach image and below the radar of public oversight, Wright was crooked — stealing from a charity fund, giving his cousin a no-work job and bullying employees to turn over to him painkilling drugs they got for legitimate medical purposes.”
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