Orange County's Amanda Helen Vargas apparently has never heard of Jenny Craig.
Vargas stole other people's private mail in hopes of finding value information, cash or credit cards that ultimately could support a methamphetamine habit she claims she started a decade ago as a way to lose weight.
Vargas committed the federal offense while already on criminal probation, but–claiming rough circumstance growing up and bad treatment by men in her life–sought leniency this month from U.S. District Court Judge Josephine Staton Tucker.
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To Vargas' delight, federal probation officers recommended a punishment of two months of incarceration.
But Assistant United States Attorney Lawrence E. Kole believed that Vargas deserved a tougher sentence: four months in prison plus four more months in a federal halfway house.
Inside the Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse in Santa Ana, Tucker handed the 33-year-old Vargas her wish: a two-month sentence plus three years of supervised probation.
She must also pay $3,576 in victim restitution.
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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.