Parents involved in the ongoing college admissions scandal should receive “slaps on the wrist” rather than “lengthy sentences” for their crimes, criminal defense attorney Jonna Spilbor argued Friday.
“Would the world be a better place if 50 some-odd parents got lengthy prison sentences because of this? No,” Spilbor told “360aproko Reports”.
“What we’re seeing here is just a series of slaps on the wrist,” she added. “It almost makes me wonder if this case would have been better served in a civil court instead of in a criminal court,”
LORI LOUGHLIN, MOSSIMO GIANNULLI SENTENCED IN COLLEGE ADMISSIONS SCANDAL CASE
On Friday, “Full House” actress Lori Loughlin was sentenced to two months in prison for her role in paying $500,000 in bribes to get her two daughters into the University of Southern California (USC) as rowing recruits. Her husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, was sentenced to five months.
“At the end of the day, I think [actress] Felicity Huffman kind of set the bar,” Spilbor told host Bill Hemmer. “She was one of the first people, if not the first person, to plead guilty and her sentence was a mere two weeks. I think the highest sentence in this case thus far has been the nine months.”
Spilbor argued that the real victims in the case were Loughlin’s daughters along with other children who sought admission to schools like USC.
“The victims here are the children of these parents who had such little confidence in them that they were willing to go to jail instead of teaching their children how to work hard and get someplace on their own,” she said, “and the other people who did show up to take the SAT with their own No. 2 pencils and didn’t get into the college of their dreams because somebody else took that spot.
“Those are the true victims and those victims need better opportunity and maybe at the end of the day, this case will shine a light on this and we will get justice at least in that sense.”
