It is “the most significant fraud on taxpayer funds in California history,” nine local district attorneys stated in a letter which first announced the charges.
Investigators found that no less than $400,000 in state benefits were paid to death-row inmates, including Peterson, who is doing time at San Quentin State Prison for the 2002 murder of his wife, Laci, and their son, who was still not born back than.
A lawyer for Peterson, Pat Harris, did not instantly reply to a request for comment Tuesday, yet told the Associated Press that investigators will find "that he had not a thing to do with any kind of scheme to get fraudulent benefits."
Schubert said that claims totaling $420,000 had been paid to death row prisoners.
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She stated that the fraud could be carried out because unlike 35 other states, California lacks a system that “cross matches” prison and jail data with unemployment claims.
Loree Levy, deputy director of the state’s Economic Development Department, announced it was “pursuing how to integrate such cross-matches moving forward as part of enhanced prevention efforts during this unprecedented time of pandemic-related unemployment fraud across the country.”
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More than $140 million was sent to other inmates in California’s 38 prisons, said Sacramento County DA Anne Marie Schubert, who assisted begin a task force that found the alleged racket.
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The alleged fraud took many forms: some claims were presented directly by inmates or by their family and friends, while other prisoners were unconscious victims, the prosecutors explained.
In other cases, claims were made using real names. Between them were 133 of the state’s 700 death row inmates, including convicted criminals like Cary Stayner, who killed four people near Yosemite National Park in 1999, or Susan Eubanks, who murdered her four sons in 1996.
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Prison gangs may have likewise been included in large-scale organized schemes to game the system.
In total, nearly $1 billion may have been paid out to people who were unworthy of the benefits due to captivity in Golden State prisons and jails, the prosecutors claim.
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“The murderers and rapists and human traffickers should not be getting this money,” said Schubert. “It needs to stop.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday announced a task force to stop the claimed abuse.
“Unemployment fraud across local jails and state and federal prisons is absolutely unacceptable,” the governor said in a statement.
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