Trial setting for former assistant court manager charged with allegedly embezzling approximately $100,000 from local court's operation department

A trial setting was scheduled this afternoon at 2 p.m. in Courtroom 5 for Socorro Maria Cervantes, former assistant court manager, who is charged with allegedly embezzling almost $100,000 from the Humboldt County Superior Court's operations department.

The Public Defender's office is representing Cervantes. Today, the attorney representing her was not in court but Ms. Jennifer Dixon, on behalf of her colleague told Visiting Judge Arvid Johnson that they had a petition to compel discovery. DDA Zach Curtis said "my office received a motion today, we are requesting time to respond." Judge Johnson said that the People's response needed to be filed by March 20. The next court date is March 17 at 2 p.m. in Courtroom 5.

There has been no follow-up on this case in the media.

Link to Times-Standard 2013 article:

http://www.times-standard.com/general-news/20131007/fortuna-woman-pleads-not-guilty-in-100k-court-embezzlement-case

Text of the article from 2103 by Thadeus Greenson

Some five years after the alleged act, a criminal grand jury has indicted a Fortuna woman for allegedly embezzling almost $100,000 from the Humboldt County Superior Court's operations department.

Socorro Maria Cervantes, the former assistant court manager, appeared in court Monday and pleaded not guilty to two felony counts of embezzlement, stemming from allegations that she stole cash payments made to the court's operations department over the course of 2008.

Cervantes, who was indicted Friday in a secret proceeding that saw 13 witnesses testify before the grand jury, was released on her own recognizance after being booked into the jail. Because Cervantes was a public officer at the time of the alleged thefts, she is not eligible for parole and faces a maximum sentence of seven years in prison if convicted.

A criminal investigation into the thefts began after a $2,400 payment to the court disappeared in late October 2008. A subsequent audit revealed that almost $100,000 in fines and fees paid to the court went missing between January and October of that year.

The investigation handed over to the state Department of Justice's Redding office in January 2009 took a turn after state budget cuts shuttered the office in July 2011, leaving the case's future unclear.

At the time, DOJ Bureau of Investigations and Intelligence Special Agent Supervisor Jeff Lierly, who headed the Redding office, said he would "try to live up to the personal commitment" he made regarding the case, but that he didn't know what the future would hold.

Prosecuting Deputy District Attorney Christa McKimmey said the DOJ turned the case over to the DA's Office Investigative Bureau in November 2011. Citing laws protecting the secrecy of grand jury proceedings, McKimmey said she couldn't comment on what evidence links Cervantes to the missing funds.

In October 2008, the court's operations office relied on two separate case management software systems to track court cases and payments, according to Court Executive Officer Kerri Keenan. She explained in a previous interview that the system used in the court's civil and family divisions worked well, leaving a clear audit log of payments received. The system used to track traffic and criminal cases and payments was antiquated, and didn't include an accounting component. That left payments coming in for court fees and traffic fines to be logged with hand-written receipts, which were later logged into a computer system.

When court administrators discovered that someone might have been stealing payments, management immediately notified the police and began the audit, which focused solely on 2008.

Keenan said Monday that it remains unclear if any of the missing payments affected court cases. She said, to her knowledge, there haven't been any complaints of payments not being credited to accounts. Some have questioned whether criminal and traffic cases accompanying the vanishing payments may have also disappeared from the system, and Keenan said that can't be ruled out as a possibility.

It's also unclear if the alleged embezzlement stretches back further. The Administrative Office of the Courts' audit only focused on one year. Keenan said there was no telling if, or how much, money is missing from previous years.

McKimmey said the question of funds missing from prior years remains under investigation.

"The investigation of thefts occurring in other years and by whom is still being looked at," she said.

In the wake of the missing funds, the court operations division put a number of checks in place to prevent thefts from occurring in the future, including the installation of surveillance cameras, the assigning of permanent cashiers to limit the number of people handling payments, and switching all criminal and traffic cases to a more modern system, which logs every transaction and who entered it.

Cervantes, who resigned her position with the court in July 2009, is due back in court Nov. 18 for a pre-trial hearing. Her attorney Patrik Griego declined to comment.

As a condition of Cervantes' release, visiting Superior Court Judge Garrett Olney ordered her not to leave the state without the court's permission. Olney said he didn't see Cervantes as a flight risk, noting that the defendant was aware of an investigation targeting her in 2009.

"The time to have left would have been 2009, and here we are four years later and she's still here," Olney said.