Background
Ryan James Williams worked as a senior desktop architect at Flexfab, LLC, where he had access to a corporate credit card and the company’s Amazon business account. Between 2015 and his termination in May 2022, Williams made thousands of unauthorized personal purchases — totaling approximately $565,000 — and submitted falsified invoices to conceal the scheme. Items purchased included video games, laptop computers, televisions, an above-ground pool, a bidet, and a $650 trashcan. Williams pleaded no contest to embezzlement of $100,000 or more under MCL 750.174(7) in October 2022 and was initially sentenced in January 2023 to 120 to 240 months’ imprisonment, a significant upward departure from the advisory guideline range of 12 to 20 months.
After Williams sought resentencing, the trial court held a new sentencing hearing in December 2023. At that proceeding, the prosecution introduced excerpts from jail phone calls in which Williams discussed his wife’s ongoing harassment campaign against Flexfab — including robocalls sent hourly to company employees and a social media smear campaign alleging fraud, labor violations, and conspiracy. Rather than discouraging the conduct, Williams responded with praise, telling his wife “I’m proud of you, give them hell, f*** those bastards,” and expressing concern only about whether the robocalls could be traced back to him. Flexfab, which had initially declined to seek incarceration, reversed its position and requested the maximum sentence as a result.
The trial court scored 10 points for Offense Variable (OV) 19 — interference with the administration of justice — based on Williams’s encouragement of his wife’s harassment, and imposed a resentence of 60 to 240 months’ imprisonment, reducing the minimum from the original 120 months. Williams appealed, arguing that OV 19 was improperly scored because the relevant conduct was his wife’s, not his, and that the upward departure was unreasonable and disproportionate.
The Court’s Holding
The Michigan Court of Appeals affirmed both the OV 19 score and the departure sentence. On OV 19, the court held that the trial court did not clearly err in finding that Williams’s own words and conduct — including affirmative encouragement, expressions of pride and love for the harassment, and failure to discourage the robocalls despite the trial court’s prior admonition to “keep your nose clean” — supported a score of 10 points by a preponderance of the evidence. The court reiterated that OV 19 may be scored for conduct occurring after the sentencing offense was completed, that actual interference is not required (an attempt suffices), and that the statutory phrase “interfered with or attempted to interfere with the administration of justice” is intentionally broad.
On proportionality, the court held that the trial court did not abuse its discretion in departing upward from the guidelines. Applying the framework from People v. Steanhouse, the court found the trial court adequately identified multiple factors that the guidelines either failed to consider or underweighted: the total amount embezzled (nearly $565,000 versus the $100,000 guidelines threshold), the nearly six-year duration of the scheme, corporate victimization and downstream cost-passing to consumers, defendant’s abuse of a position of fiduciary trust, the complexity of the fraud, and Williams’s fundamentally contradictory posture of claimed remorse alongside active encouragement of a harassment campaign against innocent former coworkers.
Key Takeaways
- OV 19 (interference with the administration of justice) can be scored based on a defendant’s encouragement and support of a third party’s harassment of victims — it is not limited to the defendant’s own direct obstructive acts.
- OV 19 scoring is expressly permitted for conduct occurring after the underlying sentencing offense was completed, including conduct between the original sentencing and resentencing.
- An upward departure from Michigan’s advisory sentencing guidelines is proportionate where the guidelines structurally fail to capture the full dollar amount of embezzlement, treat corporations as non-victims, and do not account for a defendant’s prolonged abuse of a position of trust.
- A defendant’s post-plea conduct — including encouraging a smear campaign that contradicts plea admissions — is properly considered as evidence of lack of remorse at sentencing and can support both OV scoring and departure rationale.
Why It Matters
This decision reinforces that Michigan’s OV 19 reaches beyond classic obstruction-of-justice scenarios to cover a defendant’s cheerleading of third-party victim harassment, even when the defendant is incarcerated and physically unable to act directly. Defense counsel in white-collar cases should counsel clients that jail phone calls encouraging post-plea misconduct by family members carry real sentencing consequences and can flip a victim’s sentencing position entirely — as happened here when Flexfab reversed course and demanded the maximum.
The case also illustrates the practical limits of Michigan’s advisory guidelines in large-scale embezzlement prosecutions. Because the guidelines cap property-value calculations well below the actual loss and do not formally treat corporate employers as vulnerable victims, trial courts retain wide departure discretion in cases involving sustained, high-dollar betrayals of institutional trust — and appellate courts will affirm those departures where the record reasoning is thorough.