An ex-Sandia National Laboratories employee who racked up fraudulent charges of thousands of dollars or more on his company credit card is trying to stay out of prison, according to a sentencing memo filed before Thanksgiving.
“If sentenced to pay a fine and be placed on probation for a period of five years, Mr. [Joshua] Cordova can immediately pay the fine and begin making substantial payments toward his restitution obligation,” Cordova’s attorneys wrote in the memo. “If sentenced to prison, however, Mr. Cordova will be unable to make restitution payments during his incarceration, and he will have to start rebuilding his career and life from scratch upon his release.”
Cordova worked at the Albuquerque, N.M.-based labs network from 2011 to 2019, where, among other things, he taught military, law-enforcement and emergency personnel how to use “x-ray technology and equipment for national security and anti-terrorism efforts,” the sentencing memo reads.
Cordova has admitted that he stole somewhere between $75,000 and $140,000 from Sandia by lying about purchases made on his company credit card. The U.S. Attorney prosecuting the case, who has said the low end of the total is more like $95,000, has resisted the defense’s request that the sentencing judge give Cordova a maximum of 10 months in federal prison.
In the sentencing memo, Cordova’s attorney described the ex-Sandian’s actions as the culmination of “small liberties” made “mainly out of convenience” that spiraled into larger criminal acts because they “went unnoticed.”
But prosecutors have painted Cordova as a serial abuser of government trust — citing a bad-conduct discharge from the Navy doled out after a court martial in which he was convicted after trading night vision goggles for a ring at a pawn shop — who has acted “shamelessly” in the current trial.
Cordova’s sentencing hearing was scheduled for Dec. 9 in the U.S. District Court for New Mexico.
