After being sentenced to seven years in prison and multiple attempts to delay the day of her court-ordered surrender into federal custody, former V.I. Management and Budget Director Jenifer O’Neal was once again ordered to report to U.S. Bureau of Prisons custody on July 1.
A jury found O’Neal and her codefendant, former V.I. Police Commissioner Ray Martinez, guilty of honest services wire fraud, bribery concerning federally funded programs and money laundering conspiracy in December. Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Mark Kearney sentenced O’Neal to seven years in prison for her role in a kickback scheme involving Martinez and David Whitaker, a former cybersecurity contractor, felon and cooperating witness. O’Neal’s June sentencing hearing was briefly paused after she told Kearney that she had some issues with her then-attorney, Dale Lionel Smith. After the court reconvened, she was sentenced and ordered to surrender on June 23.
O’Neal promptly fired Smith and asked Kearney for a two-month surrender date delay while she found a new attorney with whom to work on her appeal. She also referenced health problems and concerns about Smith’s representation, which Kearney rejected because she hadn’t previously raised the former issue and because, when asked, she agreed to move forward with her sentencing hearing earlier this month. Kearney gave her until July 1 to surrender.
Over the weekend, O’Neal tried to push that date again. Her current attorney, Carl Williams, argued that O’Neal is neither a flight risk nor a danger to her community and claimed that her appeal will “raise substantial questions of law and fact likely to result in reversal or a new trial.” Williams and Alexandre Dempsey, a trial attorney with the U.S. Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, presented oral arguments in a virtual hearing Tuesday afternoon.
Kearney wrote in a subsequent order that O’Neal had “not demonstrated grounds to further delay Congress’s mandate of incarceration following conviction” and offered “no basis to question the jury’s finding of guilt on honest services wire fraud and money laundering with concurrent eighty-four month sentences.”
“The parties do not dispute Ms. O’Neal is not likely to flee or pose a danger to the safety of another person or the community,” Kearney wrote in a footnote appended to the order. “We focus on whether she has shown her appeal raises a substantial question of law or fact likely to result in reversal, a new trial, a sentence not including imprisonment, or a reduced sentence shorter than the time already served plus the expected duration of her appeal. She has not. And she largely concedes she cannot meet her burden during today’s oral argument.”
