A Colorado funeral home owner who stashed nearly 190 dead bodies in a decrepit building and sent grieving families fake ashes received the maximum possible sentence of 20 years in prison on Friday, for cheating customers and defrauding the federal government out of nearly $900,000 in COVID-19 aid.
Jon Hallford, owner of Return to Nature Funeral Home, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud in federal court last year. Separately, Hallford pleaded guilty to 191 counts of corpse abuse in state court and will be sentenced in August.
At Friday’s hearing, federal prosecutors sought a 15-year sentence and Hallford’s attorney asked for 10 years. Judge Nina Wang said that although the case focused on a single fraud charge, the circumstances and scale of Hallford’s crime and the emotional damage to families warranted the longer sentence.
Some judgements are purely punitive, not intended to help anyone. From a social perspective this kind of passed judgement could hopefully prevent others from doing similar things?
Nobody does crimes thinking they are going to get caught. Or they’re passion crimes or people don’t factor the penalty because they’re not suppose to be caught
It doesn’t sound like they were considering any kind of risk-reward tradeoff when they were doing this, so I don’t think the threat of prison would have deterred them.