Heavy Sentence for Lighter Test Fraud

A US judge has sentenced a woman who falsified child safety tests on cigarette lighters to eight months in prison.

Karen Forcade, the former President of now bankrupt Florida firm Youth Research, pleaded guilty to the charges in January this year. The company worked for manufacturers on child safety studies on cigarette lighters and the fraud affected some 97 tests between 1994 and 2005.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) checks lighters for safety by arranging for panels of children to be given dummy lighters that make a sound if activated but do not light. For a lighter to pass, children must fail to activate it 85% of the time. Youth Research was paid $15k for each model that was tested.

The scam was uncovered when a scientist noticed abnormalities in the firm's data including similar handwriting on data collection forms from different testers and on all the parents' signatures on the consent forms.

Among the offences admitted, Forcade fabricated data for 96 of the 100 children in one test, and in another deleted test sheets where children had activated a lighter, which would have failed the device concerned.

U.S. District Judge James D. Whittemore said the seriousness of the crime and the length of the fraud compelled him to impose the sentence despite her age - 67 - and her disabled husband's need of constant care. He told Forcade: 'You knew full well what you were doing'.

On completion of the sentence, she will serve eight further months of house confinement followed by three years of supervisory release. Forcade will pay a $10,000 fine, although she received a much greater amount via the fraudulent testing: between $120,000 and $200,000 according to the plea agreement and around $1.4m before expenses according to Whittemore.

Forcade appeared shaken and asked for forgiveness: 'I want to say from the deepest part of my heart how sorry I am for what I have done'.