A District Court judge in New York has denied a defendant’s motion for compassionate release from home confinement, ruling the individual did not make his case for having extraordinary and compelling reasons for the judge to grant the motion.
A copy of the ruling in the case of United States v. Maurice Sessum can be accessed by clicking here.
Back in 2017, Sessum was sentenced to eight years in prison for his role in a debt collection scam that bilked consumers out of more than $30 million. Session “was a driving force behind the largest criminal debt collection scheme ever prosecuted” noted one of the attorneys that led the case against him.
Sessum then spent two years at home, allowing him to recover from a series of surgeries. He went to prison in February 2019 and was released to home confinement last year. Sessum then filed the motion for compassionate release, which would have ended the remainder of his sentence. But, as Judge Katherine Polk Failla of the District Court for the Southern District of New York noted, the claims made by Sessum in his motion “overlook the fact that he is on home confinement, and not incarcerated.”
Reviewing all of his medical records, Judge Failla determined that the defendant failed to identify the extraordinary and compelling circumstances that would warrant his release from home confinement.
Judge Failla also noted that sentencing restrictions precluded her from granting the motion. “Mr. Sessum has served only a modest portion of his term of imprisonment in a carceral setting, and to grant his compassionate release motion on this record would undercut the balance of the Section 3553(a) factors that the Court employed at his sentencing,” she wrote.
Judge Failla also denied a motion from Sessum to have the duration of his sentence recalculated.
