While generally rare, there have been a few cases involving non-violent financial crimes leading to some pretty stiff sentences. Take the executives convicted of being behind the Enron scandal, for instance: 24 to 45 years.
But there’s tough on crime, and then there’s Smith County in East Texas, where if you’re convicted of using a credit card skimmer on a gas pump, you, like a handful of other recent defendants, might be sentenced to life in prison.
Eric Dexheimer, investigative reporter for the Houston Chronicle, took a look at why the county is taking a hardline stance on sentencing, and what effects the strategy is having.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Credit card skimmers getting life behind bars? I know it’s a serious crime, but life in prison – I think of that as usually reserved for violent criminals convicted of murder or sexual assault.
Eric Dexheimer: That’s because it usually is. I started noticing these sentences coming out of Smith County a couple of years ago and have been following them, and they’ve ranged from 30 to 45 to 65 years. And as you point out, three of them were life in prison.
Is this about a single judge who doesn’t like credit card skimmers, or is this something Smith County’s decided it’s going to crack down on, or what exactly?
It’s a combination of things. I mean, Smith County has always been known for issuing very tough sentences. As I reported in my story, they famously sentenced a guy to 16 years in prison for stealing a Snickers bar. He was a habitual offender, but they had had enough.
But they’ve also had a coordinated campaign to stiffen up the sentences out there as well. They’ve lobbied the Legislature for longer sentences. They’ve got a prosecutor who’s very zealous about these, and they want to send a message.
What sort of message is being sent here? Is this raising any eyebrows in legal circles? I’m thinking there is the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, which requires that the sentence not be disproportionate to the crime.
That’s true. The cruel and unusual sentence defense has been brought up on appeal from a Smith County case. But the bar for that is really high. The Supreme Court has said as long as it’s within the sentencing kind of parameters that have been set by lawmakers, then it’s all legal.
And Smith County has lobbied the Legislature to, as I said, lengthen the sentences. Back in 2019, thanks to pressure from Smith County, they passed a law that raised the potential sentence from a maximum of 20 years to a maximum of 99 years for people who are engaged in what is called organized criminal activity. And what Smith County did is they added credit card skimming to the list of crimes that could be included.
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So this is a local law that’s been passed by commissioners, or what exactly?
No, it’s a state law, but Smith County has been using it more aggressively. They also asked the Legislature to place this new kind of fusion center in Tyler, which is in Smith County. It’s called the Financial Crimes Intelligence Center, and they concentrate on these types of crimes.
They also urged the Legislature to pass another law that basically said if any victim of a credit card skimming operation happened to live in Smith County, then the case could be brought there as well. And then it could appear in this jurisdiction that has been very enthusiastically prosecuting them.
So this is making East Texas something of a ground zero for a lot of these cases, it would sound like. Has this approach, though, had the intended effect? Does it seem to actually be deterring these sorts of financial non-violent crimes?
I think there’s an action and a reaction. Smith County officials have said that it’s had the intended effect. They had a flurry of credit card skimming operations that came through East Texas. They prosecuted them aggressively. They got some long sentences.
They even used those sentences to kind of promote their attitude toward credit card skimmers. They sent press releases to Florida, where they thought a lot of these folks were coming out of, and they claim that now credit card skimming is very rare.
The reaction is that, as I pointed out in the article, the Texas prison system, after shrinking intentionally due to a series of reforms passed in the early 2000s, is now growing again. And one of the reasons it’s growing is what’s called stacking. That is the accumulation of these lengthy sentences.
And keeping prisoners is expensive for Texas. It costs about 78 bucks a day. So the longer you have someone in there, the more expensive it is. Health care is also expensive. The population of Texas prisoners 55 and older is only 15%, but they cost more than the rest of the population combined to care for.
