The conservative writer and filmmaker was found guilty of campaign law violations. D’Souza’s website says he was “Sentenced to Probation, No Jail Time,” but an assistant to the sentencing judge told BuzzFeed News Tuesday that the facility where D’Souza will be staying is run by the Bureau of Prisons.
Dinesh D'Souza, a best-selling writer and frequent critic of President Obama, was sentenced on Tuesday to spend eight months in a facility run by the Bureau of Prisons.
D'Souza stands with his attorney, Ben Brafman, in Manhattan Federal Court in New York, in this courtroom sketch from Jan. 24.
Jane Rosenburg / Reuters
The sentencing hearing took place in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, under the auspices of Judge Richard Berman. The author and filmmaker will spend eight months in a "community confinement facility" run by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons and will be subject to five years of probation.
D'Souza was indicted in January for violating campaign laws by reimbursing two donors who each gave the maximum legal donation of $10,000 to a senatorial candidate.
The candidate, Republican Wendy Long, ran for Senate in New York in 2012 and lost by nearly 50%. D'Souza and Long attended Dartmouth College together, where they were both members of a loosely affiliated group of conservative students who rallied around the Dartmouth Review journal.
D'Souza pleaded guilty in May, stating, "I cannot believe how stupid I was, how careless, and how irresponsible," Reuters reported. The U.S. government was at the time seeking a harsh 16-month sentence.
D'Souza's website and his attorney celebrated the judge's sentence, even though the writer is set to spend the better part of a year in detention.
"We are obviously delighted that Judge Berman spared Mr. D'Souza from serving any prison sentence," Benjamin Brafman, attorney for D'Souza, said in a statement. "This was an enlightened sentence by a Court who carefully and thoughtfully reviewed all of the facts and imposed an appropriately lenient sentence."
Asked asked about the facility where D'Souza would be staying, Brafman wrote in an email to BuzzFeed News that it is a "halfway house."
"He gets to go to work during the day and sleeps there at night," he said. "It is under the control of the BOP but is not a prison."
D'Souza, whose book America: Imagine A World Without Her was at the top of the New York Times list of best-selling nonfiction in late August, has in the past said that he felt the prosecution against him was politically motivated.
The conservative writer was born in Mumbai but later became an American citizen. He renounced his position as president of King's College in 2012, a small Christian university in New York, after it became clear that he had become romantically involved with a woman who was not his wife.
from BuzzFeed - Breaking http://ift.tt/1mLBRMk
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