TULSA, OKLAHOMA - The mother of a former Tulsa Police Department employee was sentenced Wednesday to three years and a month in prison for conspiring to leak confidential information about a witness and a prison inmate.
Diana Joubert’s sentence also was for her part in a tax-fraud plot that cost the Internal Revenue Service more than $130,000.
Joubert, who was charged under the name Diana Brice, pleaded guilty Feb. 14 to her role in both conspiracies.
She admitted that in January 2005 she provided an Oklahoma Department of Corrections inmate with two known addresses of a person who had testified during a December 1999 trial in Tulsa County District Court.
Joubert, 50, said she got the addresses from her daughter, Deshon Stanley, 32.
Stanley admitted as part of her February guilty pleas that she used the Police Department’s Tulsa Regional Area Crime Information System — or TRACIS — to retrieve the addresses and that she conveyed the information to her mother, who then relayed it to the inmate.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Raley said there is no evidence that anyone was killed because of the disclosure of confidential police information.
However, he said, such leaks put people in danger and “strike at the very core of the justice system.”
Stanley was fired in April 2006 from her position as a civilian office administrator in the Police Department’s Records Room.
She pleaded guilty in February to the same two charges as Joubert, as well as to five other counts that dealt with her personal taxes.
Joubert also admitted that in December 2005 she asked Stanley to locate a previous address of a different state prisoner. Stanley used TRACIS to retrieve the information, according to court documents.
Joubert also admitted participating in a conspiracy in which people were recruited to provide identifying information about their children so that Joubert and Stanley — as well as others — could falsely claim those minors on their taxes.
Stanley, Joubert and 11 other people listed false dependents on their taxes, filing $137,033 worth of false claims, court records show.
Five of those people — including two other former TPD civilian employees — were sentenced last week to probation.
U.S. District Judge James Payne found Wednesday that Joubert led the tax plot and was “the common denominator in almost all of the fraudulent returns.”
She is to report to prison no later than Oct. 10, which is 13 days before Stanley is to be sentenced.
Joubert’s sentencing is the latest development in an investigation that began as a probe of a Broken Arrow man’s alleged drug dealing.
It evolved into an examination of leaks of confidential information out of the Tulsa Police Department and then shifted into a tax-fraud investigation.
Joubert’s attorney, Keith Ward, wrote in a pleading this week that the supposed Broken Arrow drug dealer “has slipped through the dragnet.”
Stanley made her initial appearance in federal court Feb. 28, 2006, the same day that then-Tulsa Police Detective Rico Yarbrough appeared on charges in a separate criminal complaint.
Yarbrough, 42, was sentenced Nov. 29 to three years and eight months in prison after being convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice and giving unlawful notice that a search warrant was about to be executed.
Officially, the Stanley and Yarbrough cases are unrelated. But it was revealed during Yarbrough’s trial last summer that both knew the supposed Broken Arrow drug dealer.
Yarbrough, who was not implicated in any tax crimes, is in a minimum security prison in Yankton, S.D., according to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons.
