UPDATE: U.S. District Court Judge Cormac J. Carney must have made Mariscal the happiest man in Santa Ana today when he granted his wish to avoid a minute in prison for his crimes. Carney ordered him to serve three years of supervised probation and pay restitution.
ORIGINAL POST, June 4: Saying he's repentant for filing false mortgage documents resulting in the loss of more than $763,000 in 2005 and 2006, Southern California real estate agent Mario Alberto Mariscal hopes that U.S. District Court Judge Cormac J. Carney goes easy on him this week at a sentencing hearing in Santa Ana.
In a pre-sentencing report, federal probation officials believe Mariscal's crimes deserve a minimum 30-month prison sentence.
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But, according to court records, the defendant believes the punishment
is too harsh because he claims he has cooperated with federal
investigators probing for additional suspects.
“Other
than the employment related to the current charges, he has been an
honest, hardworking and gainfully employed man his entire life,”
defense lawyer David R. Cohen wrote in a brief for the judge. “Taxpayer
money should not be spent on keeping a man incarcerated who knows the
extent of the harm he did and is willing to take any steps necessary to
rectify the situation.”
Between Dec. 2005 and Oct. 2006 in Orange
and Los Angeles counties, Mariscal used the U.S. Postal Service to mail
deeds of trust based on fraudulent mortgage applications that contained
inflated incomes and other false information about residential home
buyers who weren't qualified for loans, according to a federal grand
jury indictment.
Mariscal–who was born in 1977 and has prior convictions for dishonestly using a parking placard for the disabled and for reckless driving–originally
pleaded not guilty, but admitted his guilt last September in
hopes of winning a lenient punishment.
He is scheduled to learn his fate at an 11 a.m. hearing inside the Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse.
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.