Ex-judge calls prison ‘far beyond the pale’
Former Guilderland town justice Richard Sherwood has not had quite the federal prison experience he expected.
And he wants out, with more than two years left on his term.
The 61-year-old Sherwood — an estate and trusts attorney who ripped off elderly clients, including one with dementia, in a nearly $12 million swindle — referred to himself as a “victim,” according to a recent court filing seeking Sherwood’s compassionate release from the minimumsecurity Otisville prison camp in Orange County.
“While I certainly recognize that I am in prison and that the conditions will never be similar to life on the outside, nor should they be, these were never the conditions under which it was intended that I live when my plea was negotiated and I was sentenced,” Sherwood told his lawyer, Lauren
Owens, in February, after being rejected for release by the prison’s warden. “They are far beyond the pale.”
Sherwood said it was “pure nonsense and inexcusable” for the prison system to blame his ordeal on COVID -19.
Sherwood’s letter to Owens was included in her written request to Senior U.S. District Judge Lawrence Kahn asking him to release Sherwood. The lawyer said Sherwood suffers from multiple health issues which place him at a greater risk of contracting COVID -19.
In June 2018, Sherwood pleaded guilty to conspiring to launder money and filing a false tax return, the latter for underreporting his income by $4.7 million. His current release date is in October 2023.
Sherwood voiced frustration he could not serve his four-and-a-half-year sentence at the Otisville camp. He fumed he spent hundreds of days alongside killers, robbers and drug dealers in maximumsecurity prisons in Brooklyn and Pennsylvania, in protective custody and special housing units typically designated for disciplinary-plagued inmates.
Sherwood said he was “essentially locked in my cell every day 24-7 for almost a full year” and experienced scant privacy to use the toilet. He said he “endured extremely limited or long stretches of no use of TV, radio, computer or phone,” lacked human contact and not see his family in person for more than a year.
Kahn, who has agreed to grant compassionate release to a number of defendants during the pandemic, has previously rejected a bid for leniency sought by Sherwood’s former business partner, Thomas Lagan, who is serving a six-and-a-half year sentence.
On Thursday. Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Barnett asked Kahn to reject Sherwood as well. The former town judge has “betrayed the dead and deceived the dying,” the prosecutor said. He noted Sherwood is now vaccinated against COVID -19.
“Sherwood seeks to convert his 54-month term of imprisonment into a 19-month, timeserved term but his crimes are no less despicable with the passage of time, and a 54-month term of imprisonment remains the correct sentence,” the prosecutor stated in a memo.
“Even assuming the truth of Sherwood’s assertions,” Barnett said, “they do not give rise to an extraordinary and compelling reason for his release. Sherwood’s complaints may be valid, but they are rooted in the near-past, and arise from general conditions of confinement that thousands of inmates experienced during an unprecedented pandemic.”
Sherwood wrote that even when he was finally sent to the Otisville federal prison camp, he was locked in his cell roundthe-clock with underwhelming meals. He said meals at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn were “scalding
hot, severely overcooked and reheated way too long and were essentially inedible” and food at the prison in Allenwood, Pa. was “stone cold.”
Sherwood’s crimes were considered cold in less literal way. Since 2006, Sherwood and Lagan provided estate planning and financial advice to Niskayuna philanthropists Walter and Pauline Bruggeman. Sherwood admitted he conspired to steal millions of dollars from the estate of Pauline Bruggeman and her sisters, Anne Urban and Julia Rentz, who both died in 2013. Rentz, of Ohio, had dementia at the time. Sherwood and Lagan wrote a total of eight checks — each for $14,000 — to each other, their wives and children, and later sent tens of thousands of dollars from client estates to pay college tuition for Lagan’s daughter.
In addition to Kahn’s sentence, state Supreme Court Justice Peter Lynch sentenced Sherwood to 3-to-9 year term for second-degree grand larceny to run concurrently with the federal sentence. If Sherwood did not satisfy his state sentence by the time his federal term was completed, Lynch was expected to allow Sherwood to apply to be resentenced, effectively allowing the sentence to be four-and-a-half years.
In his gripe, Sherwood said a “retainer” was placed on him by the federal Bureau of Prisons which led him to not be placed in the Otisville camp, as he had expected.
“Unfortunately for me, I was the victim of very bad timing in not being able to address and rectify this mistake in a timely fashion as soon thereafter, the New York State courts shut down with the onset of the pandemic,” he stated,
For now, Sherwood remains at Otisville, the lock-up that has housed Michael Cohen, the former personal lawyer for ex-president Donald Trump; former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and former Senate leader Dean Skelos, among others.
Referring to Otisville, the prosecutor said: “While not a country club, the camp is hardly a rough-and-tumble prison.”