Man Sentenced for Defrauding School District

An independent study program consultant who helped defraud the Los Angeles Unified School District of more than $700,000 was sentenced Monday to nine months in prison and three years supervised release.

U.S. Senior District Judge David V. Kenyon also fined Dewey Hughes $781,651 for his role in forging documents, fabricating employment records and recruiting young people to fill folders with fake schoolwork.

Hughes pleaded guilty last year to three felony counts stemming from his participation in a scheme to charge the district for hundreds of students who never attended the program for high school dropouts known as the Institute for Successful Living. ISL was closed down by the district in 1992 after the state attorney general’s office served a search warrant on its South-Central Los Angeles offices.

“I feel ashamed that I participated and disappointed a lot of young people in South-Central L.A.,” Hughes said before his sentencing.

Hughes was described by prosecutors as the top lieutenant to ISL Director Arnese Clemon, who was also scheduled for sentencing Monday. But Clemon’s court-appointed attorney said she is disabled from three recent strokes and persuaded the judge to postpone sentencing until Jan. 27 to allow time for an independent medical exam.

Cautioning that the results of the examination would not necessarily affect his sentence, Kenyon said, “There’s a lot of disabled people in prison.”

While awaiting the judge’s ruling, Clemon sat with a metal cane hooked over the side of the defendant’s table, but she walked out of the courtroom without using it.

Hughes’ sentence was far reduced from the 25 years he faced if he had been convicted on the 20 counts originally filed against him. But under a plea agreement reached nearly a year ago, he cooperated with investigators. Within a month of his guilty plea, Clemon also changed her plea to guilty.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Maurice Suh declined to comment on the case Monday, but documents partially divulged in court describe Clemon as the mastermind of the operation and the one who stood to profit the most from it. She has consistently blamed her employees, maintaining--even at the time of her guilty plea--that she became aware of the scheme only after the fact.

“Isn’t it pretty clear that she was the leader of the whole thing?” Kenyon asked Monday.