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A Court of Appeal in the US has overturned a 10-year sentence slapped on a Kenyan for hacking and stealing from the US government. Jeffrey Sila Ndungi will now be sentenced afresh after Justices Patrick Higginbotham, Jennifer Elrod and Catharina Haynes unanimously agreed that a Northern Texas jury wrongly convicted him for aiding and participating in filing fraudulent tax returns.
The three judges ruled that there was no sufficient evidence to pin the hacker and ordered that he should be re-sentenced.
“Drawing 'all reasonable inferences in support of the verdict', we hold that the evidence was insufficient to support Sila’s Count III conviction,” the fifth circuit court found.
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According to the three judges, the argument fronted by the US authorities that Ndungi was the only user of a PayPal account that was used to siphon taxpayers’ returns was watered down by the fact that the same account was used 1,000 times after he was taken into custody.
It ordered that he be re-sentenced. “We, therefore, vacate Sila’s Count III conviction,” the judges ruled.
They however declined to determine whether the US government had correctly pegged $3.9 million (Sh434 million) loss to him.
Ndungi, 33, lived a flashy life in Kenya. He owned two Cessna planes 5Y-CCN and 5Y-CCO which he leased to Nairobi Flight Training Limited, lived in an executive apartment in South B, and owned two high-end vehicles -- an escalade and a Range Rover.
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After the jury unanimously agreed that Ndungi was guilty of two counts of theft of public funds and one count of aggravated identity theft, Justice Jane Boyle sentenced him. Very little is known about Ndungi in Kenya, except that he is the registered owner of two Cessna planes - one a two-passenger, the other a four-passenger -- that are parked at the Wilson Airport in Nairobi.
Ndungi was to serve 10 years in a Dallas prison. He was arrested in September 2016 at the Los Angeles Airport in California as he tried to flee after committing crimes involving the theft of Sh7.7 million from the US treasury.
