On Friday, Desperate Housewives star Felicity Huffman received her sentence for her role in the ongoing college admissions scandal. Huffman pleaded guilty to paying $15,000 to Rick Singer, the alleged mastermind of the scheme, to have her daughter’s SAT exam answers corrected. Her daughter had no knowledge of the crime at the time. Huffman was sentenced to 14 days behind bars, 250 hours of community service, a year of probation, and she will also have to pay a $30,000 fine. Many people feel that this sentence was too light and have shared their angry reactions on social media. Now John Legend is giving his take on the matter, according to TMZ.
On social media, many people have complained that they feel as if Huffman is getting away with her crime because she received such a light sentence. There have been many comparisons of Huffman’s case to other similar cases in which someone with less money or of a different race received a far harsher sentence for a lesser crime. Others believe that because Huffman’s sentence was so light, other celebrities will not be dissuaded to commit similar crimes in regards to using their wealth to get around the rules. In fact, the prosecution in this case actually recommended that Huffman spend a month behind bars to serve as a sort of example to discourage future crimes.
John Legend, however, says that people should have a different outlook regarding this case. He said that instead of wishing for celebrities to get more jail time than those with less money, we should instead want less jail time overall.
“I get why everyone gets mad when rich person X gets a short sentence and poor person of color Y gets a long one. The answer isn’t for X to get more; it’s for both of them to get less (or even none!!!). We should level down not up,” Legend said.
Felicity Huffman was only sentenced to one month in jail for paying bribes to get her kid into an elite college. But guess how much a homeless Black mom got for falsifying her address so her child could go to elementary school? pic.twitter.com/tPOPmaGy4K
— AFROPUNK (@afropunk) September 13, 2019
Of course, as The Inquisitr previously reported, it did help Huffman’s case that she pleaded guilty for her role in the scandal, cooperated with the investigation, and showed remorse both publicly and privately.
The other famous face of this scandal, Lori Loughlin, has opted to fight the charges. She has been accused of paying $500,000 to get her daughters into the University of Southern California.
Criminal defense attorney Matthew Maddox said that if he was Loughlin’s lawyer, he would urge her to take a plea deal immediately.
“Her prospects for winning at trial are extremely poor and her sentence will not only be commensurate with her conduct, but by that late post-trial date, she will not be able to avail herself of any of the credits provided by federal sentence guidelines,” Maddox said.
