A former Tennessee state employee and her husband have been handed prison sentences for conspiring to illegally issue over a hundred driver's licenses, officials announced Friday; the Knoxville couple took advantage of their positions revealing a breach in the system meant to ensure lawful identification issuance.
Cheryl Huff, 49, was sentenced to just over three years behind bars, and Mario Paz-Mejia, 51, was given a two-and-a-half-year sentence, both followed by one year of supervised release, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Tennessee; the duo entered plea agreements to a scheme that saw individuals, not legally qualified, obtain fraudulent Tennessee driver’s licenses, skirting the law in the pursuit of profit, these supposed gatekeepers traded ethics for cash and fabricated documents.
As part of the brazen operation, Huff, who oversaw several Driver Service Centers (DSC) in Knoxville as a District Manager for the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security (TDSHS), leveraged her access to internal systems to approve applications based on counterfeit documents, it was her word against the system, and for a time, her word was law.
Her husband Paz set the stage with would-be license holders, many not U.S. citizens or Tennessee residents, he promised them a golden ticket, a legitimate-looking piece of identity for $2,500, weaving a narrative of deceit with fake leases, birth certificates, and social security cards; all while Huff, from her position within the system, nodded the falsehoods through, granting them the patina of validity and the rights afforded therein, their actions were not just a breach of trust, they were a crack in the very foundation of lawful order and security.
U.S. Attorney Francis M. Hamilton III acknowledged the sentencing as a result of thorough investigations by the Tennessee Highway Patrol's Criminal Investigation Division and federal agencies, including Homeland Security Investigations and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, ensuring the long arm of the law reached those who thought they could evade its grasp.
