Did you not read the link you posted?
After McDowell’s arrest was nationally reported, outrage ensued, and a petition was established online calling for the charges against her to be dropped. But larceny wasn’t the only charge McDowell faced. In 2011, she was arrested again, this time on suspicion of attempting to sell drugs to and offering an undercover police officer a prostitute.
McDowell was sentenced to five years in prison and five years probation after being convicted of first-degree larceny in the school case as part of a plea deal struck with prosecutors. Had she not taken the deal, McDowell could have faced decades in prison. At the time of her sentencing her attorney, David Crosland, expressed happiness with the resolution of the case.
The McDowell case was raised again in 2019 in comparisons to the celebrity college-admissions scandal, as an example of perceived unequal sentencing meted out according to class and race, although most failed to take into account that McDowell’s sentencing was the result of a plea bargain in which she was given a lighter sentence than she could have faced had she proceeded to trial.
