Downfall of an SC law officer: Ex-sheriff Wright gets the max recommended sentence

South Carolina ex-sheriff Chuck Wright of Spartanburg County was sentenced Tuesday to the maximum recommended sentence — 41 months in prison.

The sentence to Wright, 61, by U.S. Judge Timothy Cain was delivered before a packed courtroom at the Greenville federal courthouse. In the audience were FBI and State Law Enforcement Division agents. The hearing lasted more than three hours.

“Over time, the defendant did not honor his oath,” Cain told the courtroom, saying Wright used the power of his office to steal. “His purpose was not to serve, but to be served.”

Cain also spoke of “willful blindness” by employees in Wright’s department who knew what was going on but kept it secret. “One could argue that what happened was the indictment of a system.’’

In handing down the sentence, Cain said he wanted the lengthy prison term to serve as a deterrent to potential wrongdoers in similar situations, according to people in the courtroom audience.

Wright will also have to pay $462,866 in restitution for the money he stole by using the power of his office, the judge ruled.

The three-plus years in prison that Cain handed down put a tragic cap on Wright’s 21-year career in law enforcement, a career in which he rose from a simple road deputy to the sheriff of one of South Carolina’s largest counties, leading a department of more than 600 deputies, jail guards and civilian support staff and a $60 million annual budget.

The case was not only an embarrassment to law enforcement in Spartanburg County, but to officers across South Carolina.

“I wish the guidelines would have been more because Chuck Wright deserved more. He was a total embarrassment, not only to sheriffs, but to all law enforcement in the state. For anyone who wears the badge, he betrayed them all,” said Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott after the sentencing.

Wright was undone by his uncontrollable lust for money, which led him to steal $89,000 from the department’s Benevolence Fund charity and charge thousands of dollars for personal things on his government credit card. Aside from money, his addiction to prescription drugs like oxycodone led him to bully his employees to give him drugs they or their relatives were legally taking. And he put a cousin on the sheriff’s department payroll for a $57,000-a-year job in which he did nothing.

A tipster from the sheriff’s own department triggered the investigation. But not until Wright resigned last year, while the FBI and SLED investigation was going on, did numerous witnesses start to come forward. They were afraid to come forward until then, evidence showed.

Officially, Wright was charged with embezzlement, giving the no-show paying job to his cousin and obtaining prescription drugs under false pretenses.

Federal prosecutor Elliott Daniels had asked the judge for the maximum guidelines punishment — 41 months in prison, a fitting sentence Daniels argued in a prehearing brief because Wright had misused his power.

“The abuse of power sets this case apart from most,” Daniels wrote. “Wright broke the public’s trust.”

In court Tuesday, Daniels elaborated, saying that the ex-sheriff was no ordinary defendant, but the prominent sheriff of a large law enforcement department, and his law enforcement office and badge were the instruments by which he committed his crimes.

Sentences for nonviolent federal crimes are usually much less than the 41 months that Wright wound up getting, even though he hired two experienced criminal defense lawyers to organize and plead his case in the most sympathetic manner possible.

They were Greg Harris of Columbia and former U.S. Rep. Trey Gowdy, a Fox News commentator, crime novel writer and former prosecutor who has known Wright for years.

The two high-profile defense lawyers had Wright jump through all the hoops that defendants can to get a judge to give them a low sentence: Wright admitted everything, voluntarily handed in his gun and badge, resigned his office, expressed remorse, entered treatment for drug addiction and pleaded guilty.

Harris and Gowdy prepared a 14-minute video in which people told about the good Wright had done. They also hired a renowned forensic psychiatrist, Donna Maddox, who diagnosed Wright with post-traumatic stress disorder from a malignant childhood and other causes.

Tuesday, Harris and Gowdy accompanied Wright — wearing a dark suit and tie — as he arrived at the federal courthouse in Greenville. Several people in line at the courthouse jeered the ex-sheriff, a witness said.

In their written memo to the judge arguing for no prison, Harris and Gowdy referred to Wright’s turbulent childhood as they wrote, “Some of what befell Mr. Wright, to be sure, was an inability to outrun or navigate the abuse he suffered at the hands of his father, but law enforcement is a profession that routinely exposes its officers to violence, human suffering, and tragedy, often without meaningful opportunity for emotional processing.”

“Mr. Wright internalized those experiences for years, believing — as many officers are conditioned to believe — that endurance and silence were part of the job. That unaddressed trauma manifested as post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition that went untreated until the events of this case forced him to confront it directly and seek help,” they wrote.

Harris and Gowdy in their memo stressed Wright was conquering being a slave to the drug addiction that had led him into a life of secret crime at odds with the badge he wore.

Because Wright is working on redemption and has fallen in disgrace from the job that meant everything to him, he — by implication — should be considered to have suffered enough without going to prison, they wrote.

But the judge was more moved by the facts of the case and prosecution’s arguments.

“Loss of trust is his legacy, and abuse of power is his legacy,” Daniels told the judge.

The facts of the case showed that Wright stole $89,000 in all at different times from the office’s Benevolence Fund, a pot of money that was supposed to go to Spartanburg County deputies and their families when they suffered bereavement, financial difficulty or line-of-duty trauma.

Once Wright took $1,000 out of the fund to pay for drugs. He took so much out of the fund sometimes that money was unavailable for real charity cases, such as when a deputy’s wife was in hospice with stage 4 cancer, evidence showed.

He also misused his department credit card, putting more than $17,000 in personal expenses on the card. The personal expenses included paying for Amazon Prime, the Apple iTunes store (he liked the Castle Crush game), Sirius XM and various online video games, fitness and health programs and a Christian streaming entertainment platform, evidence showed.

He also pressured deputies and their relatives for prescription of painkilling drugs they were legally taking, targeting them at funerals, churches and following surgical procedures, evidence showed. He also bought drugs while wearing his sheriff’s uniform, evidence showed.

In 2021 Wright arranged for a cousin, Lawson Watson, to be employed in the civil division of the sheriff’s department. Under the arrangement, Wright would not have to do any work for or even show up.

The scheme — in which Watson made $57,000 a year for no work — went on for years until an anonymous caller phoned in a tip to the county tip line.

Bryan Stirling, U.S. attorney for South Carolina, said, “Wright’s abuses represent a grave violation of public trust. He let down the people who elected him to serve. The U.S. attorney’s office, along with our law enforcement partners, will continue to investigate public corruption and hold those who abuse their positions of power accountable.”

FBI Columbia Special Agent in Charge Kevin Moore said, “Today’s sentencing reaffirms that honor and integrity remain core traits of wearing a law enforcement badge. There is a real cost for tarnishing the badge and the trust it represents, and former Spartanburg County Sheriff Chuck Wright will now face that consequence.”

Wright’s two co-defendants, Amos Durham, who helped Wright steal from the Benevolence Fund, and Watson, the no-show employee, are scheduled to be sentenced Thursday, July 9.

“I think the judge did exactly what was needed,” said John Crangle, a Columbia attorney who writes on public officials’ ethics. A book he wrote on crooked South Carolina sheriffs will be published this fall, and he wrote a book on the Lost Trust legislative scandal of the 1990s.

Even now, other sheriffs are likely committing crimes, Crangle said. The office of sheriff presents a lot of opportunities for sheriffs to commit crimes, and they are under little supervision, he said.

Since the year 2000, 15 South Carolina sheriffs have been convicted of crimes in state and federal courts, and two others were found to have been stealing after they died, Crangle said

“Sheriffs are not supervised or monitored, and there’s no inspection system the way the military does. Even FBI offices have a regular inspection system,” Crangle said.

Asked if he was going to go to the sheriffs’ annual convention in Myrtle Beach later this month and speak on possible reforms and the need for supervision, Crangle laughed and said, “I’d probably end up dead.”

This is a breaking news story and will be updated.

This story was originally published July 7, 2026 at 1:37 PM with the headline "Downfall of an SC law officer: Ex-sheriff Wright gets the max recommended sentence."