Sherri Papini, the California woman who pleaded guilty to faking her own kidnapping and lying about it to the FBI, should be sentenced to eight months in prison, prosecutors say.
"A lesser sentence, such as the one month of imprisonment recommended by probation or home detention in lieu of incarceration, is not sufficient to achieve the purposes of sentencing," prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memorandum filed Monday in U.S. District Court for Eastern California. They also recommended three years of supervised released after time served.
Papini pleaded guilty in April to two counts of a 35-count indictment, admitting to mail fraud and lying to a law enforcement officer.
The charges didn't stem from faking her abduction but rather from the lies she continued to tell years after she returned.
Papini, a mother of two from Redding, was arrested more than five years after she was reported missing in November 2016. She reappeared on Thanksgiving about 145 miles south of where she vanished with injuries that authorities now believe were self-inflicted and a brand on her shoulder that she blamed on her abductors.
Papini had told police that two Hispanic women took her. But investigators found male DNA on Papini’s clothing — DNA that led them to her ex-boyfriend, whom she had been staying with the entire time she pretended to be missing.
The former boyfriend told investigators that Papini had asked him to hit her — he wouldn’t, but he agreed to hold a hockey stick for her to run into and to pelt her with hockey pucks. He also branded her when she asked him to.
"State and federal investigators devoted limited resources to Papini’s case for nearly four years before they independently learned truth: that she was not kidnapped or tortured," prosecutors said in the sentencing documents.
"She maintained her hoax and received Social Security and California Victims’ benefits for years, demonstrating that she had no remorse for her actions even after the FBI presented her with evidence of her fraud," the documents said.
Papini has been ordered to pay more than $300,000 in restitution to the California Victim Compensation Board, the Social Security Administration, the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office, which led the investigation, and the FBI.
The government said an eight-month sentence would discourage Papini from ever trying such a scheme again and dissuade others from committing fraud.
The sentence is also appropriate, prosecutors said, because Papini's crimes had "many societal harms such as causing the public to live in fear and possibly causing law enforcement to doubt the veracity of future victims’ claims."
"An entire community believed the hoax and lived in fear that Hispanic women were roving the streets to abduct and sell women," prosecutors said.
Papini is due to be sentenced Monday. Her attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
