A year ago, U.S. District Court Judge Cormac J. Carney punished a Southern California corporate executive who'd stolen more than $1 million by sentencing him to a year of probation and, incredibly, not a minute of jail time.
Carney is at it again.
This week, the former corporate lawyer and 2003 President George W. Bush appointee finally got around to punishing another white collar criminal arrested by the FBI nearly 2,400 days ago.
Charged in a 2007 federal indictment, John Jay Callahan worked as a client manager at Citibank where he participated in a “fraudulent equipment leasing” scheme involving the theft of at least $9.5 million.
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People who've stolen clothes, candy bars or a six-packs of beer have gone to prison for years in California.
But Carney–a former star UCLA football player–decided to go easy on this crooked businessman from Warminster, PA.
After sealing evidence of the defendant's guilt, he punished Callahan (a.k.a. John Jay Callaghan) with 120 hours of community service and waived a $100 court fine.
In 2009, a Wall Street Journal writer celebrated Carney for dismissing charges against Broadcom Corporation officials accused of illegally backdating documents and lecturing a federal prosecutor for aggressively pursuing the corporate executives.
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CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.