By Michael Rubinkam
Associated Press
WILKES-BARRE, Pa. — A former police chief accused of hindering an FBI investigation into the beating death of an illegal Mexican immigrant was sentenced Wednesday to 13 months in prison after a federal judge called sentencing guidelines “overly harsh.”
The sentence handed down to former police Chief Matthew Nestor was even less than his own attorneys asked for and well below the 57 to 71 months recommended in a presentence report filed by the probation department.
Senior U.S. District Judge A. Richard Caputo called the guidelines “inappropriate” for Nestor, who was convicted in January of falsifying a police report related to the July 2008 attack on 25-year-old Luis Ramirez.
Caputo said Nestor’s report “may well have had the potential to impede the federal investigation of a hate crime involving a homicide” but went on to call the sentencing guidelines too severe.
Federal prosecutors charged Nestor, Lt. William Moyer and a third former officer with helping a group of white high school football players conceal their roles in the fatal beating.
Jurors cleared all three defendants of conspiracy to obstruct the federal investigation, but Nestor was convicted of a single charge that he failed to record the names of the suspects and omitted the fact that he had numerous phone conversations with one of the defendant’s mothers, Tammy Piekarsky, in the hours after Ramirez was attacked.
“He was unable to separate himself as a human being from the fabric of his community and the friendships he had,” Caputo said of Nestor.
Two of Ramirez’s assailants, 21-year-old Derrick Donchak and 19-year-old Brandon Piekarsky, were convicted of a federal hate crime and are serving nine-year prison sentences.
Nestor maintained his innocence while addressing the court Thursday. He said he set out to “write a concise, informative police report with what I did, what I saw, what I heard.”
He denied trying to craft a report that would help the teens and said he would write the report the same way again.
“I respect the jury’s verdict. I don’t understand it, but I respect it,” Nestor said. He is appealing his conviction.
Before Nestor was sentenced, federal prosecutor Myesha Braden said the chief “abused his position of trust.”
“As chief of police, he had an obligation to see that justice was done, to see that the truth came out. ... He undermined that system of justice by filing these false police reports,” Braden said.
Moyer was found guilty of lying to the FBI. He was sentenced later Wednesday to three months in prison. His attorneys had requested probation while prosecutors sought a year in prison.
Nestor and a fourth officer were charged with extorting money from bookmakers running illegal gambling operations, but the extortion charges were dismissed and a jury acquitted both men of civil rights and obstruction counts.
Copyright 2011 Associated Press