Making her first public statement since being accused of stealing nearly $1 million in taxpayer money, Shelton’s former assistant finance director said Thursday she looted city coffers for nearly a decade because she was “scared and under stress.”
Faced with mortgage and credit card debt her lawyer estimated at $11,000 a month, the former official, Sharon Scanlon, said she “took the easy way out” by writing city checks to herself, cashing them, and then entering them as voided in the city’s books.
“Because I was too proud to ask for help or guidance, I have put myself and my family in a much worse position,” Scanlon told Judge John J. Ronan at Superior Court in Milford before being sentenced to serve four and a half years behind bars. “My priorities were wrong and now I have hurt so many people because of that.”
Click the play button to watch Scanlon’s remarks.
Her voice breaking occasionally, Scanlon told the judge she knew her actions were “deplorable” and betrayed the way her parents raised her, “to always do the right thing.”
“I have failed in that,” she said. “I will spend the rest of my life trying to make amends for this crime, both financially and emotionally.”
Judge Ronan agreed.
“Hopefully in future years you can make amends and you can be the person you were many years before you did this, before you violated the public trust,” he said before handing down the four-and-a-half year prison term.
The judge’s remarks ended a 40-minute proceeding that at times raised more questions than answers, as State’s Attorney Kevin Lawlor noted at the beginning of the hearing.
Puzzling Case
“This case in a lot of ways is kind of a puzzle,” Lawlor said.
Scanlon was an “otherwise upstanding citizen,” he said, who had a city job that paid her around $80,000 per year.
“Most people I know would love to be able to have a job like that,” he said. “At the same time … basically for about eight years, every month at the beginning of the month, Ms. Scanlon made the conscious decision to steal between $7,000 and $10,000 from the city, almost as if it was a second paycheck.”
The two videos below show Lawlor’s complete statement in court.
He said the case came down to the question of “why good people do bad things?”
That wasn’t the prosecutor’s only question.
“Where did the money go?” he wondered, noting that a pre-sentence report prepared by a probation official noted Scanlon’s family was in danger of losing their Crescent Drive home. “How can you have that much money left to pay off when you’ve been stealing 10 grand (a month) for eight years?”
Scanlon didn’t blame the thefts on a drug or gambling addiction, he noted. “It doesn’t seem as if she lived lavishly,” either, or sent her kids to expensive private schools. “And yet none of this money was found … (and) she’s never explained it.”
Scanlon previously accepted a plea deal in the case last October that called for her to serve between three and seven years in jail on larceny and forgery charges.
The prison term handed down Thursday leaned toward the lower end of the sentencing guideline.
“This isn’t a mistake … like I did something one time and ruined my life with a rash decision,” Lawlor said, contrasting Scanlon’s case with a person who drives drunk and causes a a terrible accident.
“This is something completely different,” he said, noting that though Scanlon stole from the city for nearly a decade, the statute of limitations only allowed him to prosecute her for the past five years of missing money. “This is something where every single month for the five years that we’re allowed to go back and look and prosecute for, she chose to make that mistake.
“And she didn’t just make it once,” the prosecutor went on. “She had to figure out how she was going to take it, then she had to bring it over to the bank and deposit it, every single month … There was only three months in this entire timeframe when she chose not to do it.”
Lawlor also noted that Scanlon is just one of many public officials accused in recent years of stealing taxpayer money, saying Scanlon should be “punished severely” to set an example to others.
“These cases have become all too common,” Lawlor said. “I think this is the third or fourth individual in this small jurisdiction alone where we’ve had a situation like this.”
Not A First For The Valley
Scanlon’s sentencing Thursday marked the conclusion of just the latest case of official wrong-doing in City Halls in the lower Naugatuck Valley.
In November 2012, Karen Guillet, Oxford’s former tax collector, was sentenced to serve four years in prison for stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from town coffers.
In Ansonia, a Valley Indy investigation published in July 2012 revealed Bridget Bostic, the city’s former tax collector, had given out forms to family and friends saying they had paid off car taxes when they hadn’t.
In Derby, city officials reached an agreement with a former tax clerk who they said “damaged“ the city to the tune of about $9,000 in which the clerk agreed to pay back the money in exchange for the city not lodging a complaint with police. City Aldermen voted to classify an internal report on the matter under attorney-client communication.
“It’s something that makes us all look bad, because what you can never take back after these types of incidents occur … they cast the light of doubt about their government on everybody else,” Lawlor said. “Everybody gets treated a little differently after cases like this, because members of the public, all those hardworking people who are paying their taxes, assume that everybody is like this, or that a lot of us are like this, when it’s not really the case.”
Lawlor also wondered why she wasn’t caught sooner.
“That she was allowed to steal this much money is something that again causes me to scratch my head,” he said. “She probably should have been caught a lot sooner, but she wasn’t. She was allowed to continue to do this.”
“But what does that say about her, that she was able to get away with it for so long that she didn’t just quit while she was ahead and probably never would have been found out?” he wondered.
‘All of Us Are Flawed’
In response, Scanlon’s lawyer, high-profile defense attorney William F. Dow, said he agreed with 95 percent of what the prosecutor had said.
“People deserve to have faith in the people who work for the government,” Dow said. “Sharon Scanlon knows that.”
“All of us are flawed, no matter who they are,” he went on, saying, for example, that otherwise good people can yell or hit their kids when angry, even though they know that’s not right. “I’ve made a living representing people, otherwise rational and logical people, who act irrationally.”
Dow’s complete statement is in the videos below.
Dow blamed the thefts on a “a flaw in Ms. Scanlon’s ability to cope with the situation.”
“This would be an easier case … if we had a woman here who had a bunch of show horses, a ski chalet in Vermont, if she had a gambling problem,” he said.
The lawyer cited several letters sent to Judge Ronan on Scanlon’s behalf, noting that, for example, she helped take care of her dying mother-in-law, and a friend of hers who suffered a stroke and has since died.
He also, like Lawlor, wondered how Scanlon was able to get away with stealing money for so long, saying the city should sue its auditors.
“There was a lack of protection established by the auditors, there was a lack of adequate review by the auditors,” he said. “This (case) came about only because an uncashed check was laying around.”
For more background on how Scanlon was caught — by two inquisitive clerks in the city’s finance department — click here to read a previous story.
Dow said much of the money she stole went to pay off mortgage and credit card debt he estimated at $11,000 per month.
She also was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2009 and underwent two surgeries and chemotherapy and radiation treatments.
Around the same period, her husband broke both his legs and she had to are for him, he said.
Dow noted that doesn’t excuse her behavior, which he described as Scanlon “acting like an ostrich.”
“Some people can take a problem, analyze it, and then go to somebody else and say ‘Look, help me solve this,’” he said. “Other people can’t do that. That’s her limitation. She could never go to somebody else and say ‘Look, I’m jammed up.’”
“She certainly knew it was wrong,” Dow said. “It was a course of conduct to which she became committed because of her affection for her family. That does not make it right.”
‘I Am Begging For Leniency’
Given the opportunity to speak, Scanlon rose uneasily and sniffled before addressing the judge.
“Words cannot begin to express the regret I have for my actions,” she said. “I am truly sorry for what I have done.”
She apologized to her co-workers, and to Shelton residents.
“All I can say is that I was scared and under stress,” she said. “I made a horrible mistake and took the easy way out … My priorities were wrong and now I have hurt so many people because of that.”
“I am truly remorseful,” she said. “Being locked up will not make me regret my actions any more than I do.”
She said it’d be better if she was able to help support her family and get a job to start paying back the money she owes in restitution, and help support her family.
She said she’s so ashamed she’s stayed in her house since a cloud of suspicion descended on her a year and a half ago, and only goes out to go grocery shopping or take her son to school.
“I’ve torn up my credit cards and lived very modestly,” she told the judge. “I have accepted that I have to change the way that I live and I have begun on that path.”
“I am asking you to make (the jail sentence) as short as possible so that I can get out, get gainful employment, and begin to make restitution, so I can begin to mend my relationships with all the people I have hurt,” Scanlon said. “I am begging for leniency.”
Article continues after the timeline below.
How Could You?
In summing up the case, Judge Ronan said he was left asking many of the same questions brought up by Lawlor and Dow.
“How could a person as good as you, as a wife, a daughter, a mother, friend, how could you do this?” he said. “You were like an all-American person, good in every way.”
Plenty of people will never have what Scanlon had, he noted — a good job, a great family, lots of friends.
“They work hard, they’re law-abiding, they go on with their lives and do what they have to do,” the judge said. “And (they) never succumb to the temptation of stealing from others, let alone their employer, and let alone public funds.”
The judge also wondered why her cancer diagnosis didn’t cause her to straighten up.
“Most people when they hear that type of diagnosis say to themselves, ‘What am I doing? Where am I going here?’ Why would you not at that point at least say that to yourself?” he said. “That didn’t happen. (The thefts) continued on.”
“It was not a spur-of-the-moment decision on your part and it was not the result of any special understandable circumstance,” the judge said. “It was planned, it was deliberate, it was recurring, and frankly the only real reason, if there is one, would seem to be it was greed, not need, and a misguided interest in supposedly benefiting your family.”
“Not only has it not benefited them, it’s left them with this terrible burden as they go forward with their lives,” he added.
Judge Ronan then sentenced Scanlon to a 12-year prison term to be suspended after four and a half years, followed by five years of probation.
While on probation, Scanlon must pay restitution of $230,725, or be subject to going back to jail seven and a half years — the unsuspended portion of her prison sentence.
The judge also ordered her to submit financial affidavits showing the sources of her income are valid, and maintain gainful employment that must be approved by probation officials, preferably not involving unrestricted access to employer’s funds.
Reaction
After Scanlon’s sentencing, Dow said he obviously would’ve preferred a three-year sentence, but said that compared to other similar cases, four and a half years isn’t inappropriate.
“This is a young woman who didn’t have the tools to cope with and address the problems that were presented to her by her life,” he said, adding that “There were financial pressures that were placed on her that she was unable to deal with in a way other than what she did.”
“Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future,” the lawyer said. “Sharon Scanlon is a good person, she’s a good person today, (and) when she gets out of jail she’ll continue to be a good person.”
Dow also reiterated his belief that the city should sue its auditors.
“They go to the void checks and then check the cancelled checks for that month,” he said. “When they see one is missing, they see gee that’s strange, then they go to a second month and see that it’s approximately the same amount and see that’s missing.
“Maybe someone somewhere, there’s a little bird saying maybe this is a problem. Apparently the auditors hired by the town of Shelton didn’t listen to that bird.”
Lawlor agreed.
“I think it’s a fair question,” he said of how Scanlon’s thefts weren’t discovered sooner. “How could it be allowed to go on for eight years?”
The Valley Indy left a message with Mayor Mark Lauretti Thursday afternoon seeking comment on the lawyers’ remarks.
