Former deputy cuts OT case deal
She can keep present job but will otherwise be in jail for 12 months.
WEST PALM BEACH — A yearlong jail sentence for a former Palm Beach County sheriff ’s lieutenant Thursday marked the end of the 2008 scandal involving corrections officers’ misuse of the agency’s overtime system.
With a trial in her case just days away, Sandra Nealy accepted a plea agreement and will turn herself in March 4 to begin serving a 12- month sentence at the same jail where she started as a deputy and worked her way up through the ranks.
Nealy was the last of seven high-ranking corrections deputies arrested after an internal probe uncovered she and others manipulated the office’s overtime assignment logs to reserve lucrative hospital duty overtime shifts for themselves by using some lower ranking deputies’ names to block off the assignments before other deputies could sign up.
Her attorney, Michael Salnick, said she decided only within the past two days
to accept the plea, even though an appellate court in one sergeant’s case had characterized the case as a violation of department policy and not a crime, and Nealy appeared to be mounting a strong defense based on showing that other high-ranking deputies committed similar offenses but were never arrested or even fired.
Salnick had just added a forensic accountant to the defense witness list, and according to court records he planned to show jurors in the case internal reports from the Sheriff ’s Office showing that other deputies accused of committing the same types of overtime abuses received relatively light punishment and are still employed with the Sheriff ’s Office.
As part of the agreement between Salnick and prosecutor Marci Rex, Circuit Judge John Kastrenakes on Thursday ruled that Nealy could spend her jail time in the work release program. She can keep the job she’s had since she left the Sheriff ’s Office, work six days a week and remain in jail before and after each shift.
Nealy apologized during the hearing, saying, “As a result, some deputies weren’t able to work overtime, and for that I apologize.” She also reiterated that she worked every hour she was paid for and the case didn’t involve any theft.
Until the case was set for a plea conference Wednesday, both sides appeared from court records to be preparing for a trial starting Tuesday. Had she gone to trial, Nealy would have faced 122 third-degree felony counts of official misconduct, punishable by a maximum 610 years in prison. Under sentencing guidelines, Salnick said, she was facing a recommended sentence of 23 years.
Kastrenakes sentenced former sheriff ’s Lt. Darrin McCray, a co-defendant, to 18 months in prison after McCray took his case to trial and was convicted, although Kastrenakes recently reduced that sentence by a month. But Rex said Nealy’s case was the most egregious, estimating that in a year she made more than $40,000 in overtime.
So rather than risk a prison sentence, Nealy pleaded guilty to 20 misdemeanor counts of criminal use of public information.
The end of her case closes what was former Palm Beach State Attorney Michael McAuliffe’s first — and ultimately one of his only — sweeping public corruption busts during his three years in office.
Though Salnick declined to comment on McAuliffe’s charging decision, he did say he thought the case was one of prosecutors “wanting to capitalize on something that should have never been charged as a crime in the first place.”
“I don’t know why it even got to this level,” Salnick said. “I think there were some people who were jealous, who complained, and it became an internal investigation that they just kept pushing.”
Nealy and former Lt. George Behar were the last of the defendants with open cases, and Behar took a plea deal last week on a misdemeanor charge and received a year of probation.
Sgt. Kathy Dent, like McCray, went to trial and was convicted on scheme to defraud charges. She received a three-year probation sentence, but the 4th District Court of Appeal in 2013 threw out her conviction and sentence, saying that although she may have violated department policy, she committed no crime.
Sgts. Edy Velasquez, Faulton Kemph and John McCaffrey also all faced felony charges, but they pleaded guilty to misdemeanors and agreed to resign from the agency in exchange for sentences of 100 hours of community service.
Though Salnick and others on Thursday said they still didn’t believe the deputies’ actions warranted criminal charges, Rex pointed out that because the overtime logs were official public records, anything Nealy and the others did to falsify those documents was against the law.
And because Nealy and the others involved were higher-ranking and made more money than rankand-file deputies, Sheriff Ric Bradshaw said at the time of the arrests that the department had spent more taxpayer dollars paying for overtime than they would have if the system had been used properly.
Rex agreed with that principle, and characterized Nealy as the ringleader.
“Much of this came through her, and she was the one who made the most money,” Rex said.