Fraudster Sentenced to Over 40 Years Wins Compassionate Release

A Montgomery, Ala., woman who was sentenced in 2008 to more than 40 years imprisonment in connection with a scheme to defraud FEMA of Hurricane Katrina disaster relief funds will be released decades early.

Bernetta LaShay Willis won her bid for compassionate release, with a sentence of time served, with a ruling by the US District Court for the Middle District of Alabama Monday.

Willis’ medical conditions and the Bureau of Prisons’s unsuccessful attempts to treat them surgically are of the sort of “extraordinary and compelling circumstances” that warrant compassionate release, Judge Myron H. Thompson said.

The outcome of the ...