"Former Claremont professor who faked vandalism gets year in jail"

I didn't expect Kerri Dunn to receive any jail time at all, and I think the sentence is quite harsh:

A former Claremont McKenna College psychology professor convicted of falsely reporting her car was vandalized and spray-painted with racist and anti-Semitic slurs was sentenced Wednesday to a year in state prison.

Kerri Dunn, 40, of Redlands, had claimed her car was targeted in what at first appeared to be a hate crime while she was speaking at a campus forum on racial tolerance...

Dunn was convicted Aug. 18 of one misdemeanor count of filing a false police report and two felony counts of attempted insurance fraud stemming from the March 9 incident. She had faced anywhere from probation to three years in prison...

Previous Kerri Dunn coverage starts here.

UPDATE: Apparently there's a press release or similar statement here, but I can't access that page at the present time.

The 11/22/04 entry here starts with: "I am not embarrassed that I was hoodwinked by Kerri Dunn. I was present at the fervent meetings that transpired in the days after the hate crime happened, including a prayer walk and vigil at the Claremont Colleges' Walker Wall. I heard the inexplicable shouts emanating from a passing car on Foothill, trying to intimidate our collective..." and goes downhill from there.

UPDATE 2: There's a local report here. It includes these quotes from the judge: "What she did was at least temporarily terrorize the minority students on campus and make suspects out of the rest." "Something is going on with her such that she hasn't been able to get a grip on herself." "I have literally laid awake nights wondering about the tack she's taken."

Comments

It is excessive, and they made too much of a cause celebre out of it. The least educated or longest-out-of-school would be those who don't realize that being called racist is one of the least remarkable occurrences on a college campus, and that hardly any one responds to it, such terms as racism having been equivocated on campus so voluminously and in so many ways, that it is almost inaudible. It certainly does not often carry any associations with morality as such.