The former national chairman of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference has been sentenced to 18 months in prison on theft and other felony charges linked to a meal program for older, poor people that authorities say failed to provide some meals it was paid to deliver in southwest Ohio.
A judge in Dayton on Wednesday also ordered the Rev. Raleigh Trammell, 74, to pay $38,020 in restitution to Montgomery County.
Trammell was president of the SCLC Dayton chapter, which had a contract with the county to deliver nutritious meals to low-income senior citizens. The county paid $38,000 to the Dayton group for 7,000 meals that were not delivered between 2005 and early 2010, according to prosecutors, who say they don’t know what happened to the money.
A jury in June found Trammell guilty of 51 charges including one count of grand theft and 25 counts each of forgery and tampering with government records.
Trammell’s attorneys, Candace Crouse and Martin Pinales, did not return calls for comment after the sentencing. But Trammell’s attorneys had argued that he and the rest of the Dayton chapter were guilty of nothing more than accounting errors.
While prosecutors have said that it is unclear where the $38,000 went, they say Trammell — on behalf of the program — signed contracts with the county to deliver the meals.
Crouse has said Trammell was in charge of securing grants for programming and delegated program operations to others. She also said after the verdict that prosecutors did not provide enough evidence to support the charges.
Two of the people who Trammell claimed to feed were dead, two had never heard of his program and three were in long-term care facilities and were not receiving extra meals, according to prosecutors.
“Not only did this defendant steal taxpayer money, but he denied meals as promised to elderly and frail citizens” county Prosecutor Mat Heck Jr. said in a statement Wednesday.
Trammell could have been sentenced to up to 76 ½ years on all charges, but some of the counts merged for sentencing purposes.
The judge said Trammell could have a week to get his affairs in order before reporting back to the court Sept. 5
Trammell, the former president of the Dayton chapter and a former chairman of the national SCLC, which is based in Atlanta, was indicted in January 2011.
Trammell lost his leadership roles at the Dayton and national SCLC levels in 2010 after a dispute among factions at the national level.
The SCLC, co-founded by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1957, was a leading voice in the civil rights movement. The organization has lost members in the decades since King’s death in 1968 and has faced financial difficulty and infighting in recent years.
The national group did not immediately return a call to its headquarters Wednesday.
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