School Board Member Convicted

Inglewood school board member Cresia Green-Davis was convicted Friday on 14 charges that included welfare fraud, lying about her academic background and violating campaign finance reporting laws.

After about 2 1/2 days of deliberations, the downtown Los Angeles jury returned guilty verdicts on all of the charges against Green-Davis, a former teacher for two school districts.

Because some of the charges involve felony perjuries, Green-Davis will be forced to give up her seat on the school board after sentencing and, unless the convictions are overturned, she cannot hold elected office in California. She is seeking reelection in April to the Inglewood Unified School District board.

Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Bob Bowers set her sentencing for Feb. 24. Green-Davis, 52, could be sent to state prison for up to 15 years.

She was taken into custody immediately after the verdicts. Her attorney, William Hardy, could not be reached for comment Friday.

Deputy Dist. Attys. Jennifer Lentz Snyder and Alfred Coletta together prosecuted Green-Davis, after combining what had originally been three cases.

Coletta said authorities initially investigated Green-Davis on suspicion of welfare fraud, then began looking into her history as a teacher with the Compton and Centinela Valley school districts.

A third investigation led to misdemeanor convictions on finance reporting violations stemming from her Inglewood school board campaign and tenure on the board.

“Finally, justice was served for a community and the various state and county departments that had been defrauded,” Coletta said after Friday’s verdicts.

Jurors found Green-Davis had fraudulently received at least $36,000 in welfare and other aid for the poor between November 1995 and April 2001. They also found that she had defrauded the two school districts by falsely claiming to have earned a bachelor’s degree. She taught in Compton until 1998 and then moved to Centinela Valley, where officials dismissed her when charges were filed in 2003, Coletta said.

Green-Davis won her school board seat in the politically fractious city in 2001 and was board president when she was arrested in 2003 on welfare fraud and other charges.

While the district attorney’s office was investigating her in early 2003, she told The Times that she had made some mistakes, including shoplifting from a local department store. She was convicted of misdemeanor theft in 1995 and was sentenced to two years’ probation and 200 hours of community service.

“I’ve done my time -- I’m not trying to play like some holier-than-thou person,” she said in an interview at the time. “People have done worse things than me. We all make mistakes.”

In the same interview, she said that she had been arrested for stealing from a bookstore while a student at Eastern Michigan University, and she said her former husband and political opponents had sparked the district attorney’s investigation.

While she was facing a 2003 preliminary hearing in the welfare fraud case, her then-attorney said Green-Davis was only trying to make ends meet as a single mother supporting twin sons.