From Experience to Repair
I met Stephen L. Keller through a mutual acquaintance named Tim.
I had known Tim through the local business community, and he knew about the legal matter I was going through. He thought Steve and I should meet. We were all connected in various ways to Bayside Community Church, where I lead a Bible study called Bayside Business Builders.
At first, I understood the introduction in fairly practical terms. Steve had already traveled through parts of a system that were still unfamiliar to me. He could help me understand what I was facing and what the road ahead might look like.
He has done that. But over time, I have begun to wonder whether God has bigger plans than Steve helping me navigate a difficult process.
Steve has a story that is difficult to summarize without either understating it or giving too much away.
At 27, he founded a financial company and helped pioneer the viatical settlement market, which allowed terminally ill policyholders to access the value of life insurance benefits while they were still living. His business grew rapidly. What followed included an investigation, a federal trial, an international arrest, extradition, and nearly nine years in federal prison.
His memoir, Pay to Play, tells that story through his own eyes. It covers the rise of the business, the collapse that followed, and his account of the intersection of ambition, money, politics, and institutional power. I will leave the fuller story to him. It is his to tell, and he has spent years working out how to tell it.
Steve continues to maintain his innocence.
There are parallels between his experience and mine, although I do not want to collapse two different cases into a single story. The underlying businesses were different. The alleged conduct was different. The people, evidence, and circumstances were different.
The common ground was more basic: both of us faced federal fraud prosecutions, maintained our innocence, chose to go to trial, and were convicted.
That shared experience gave us a language for certain conversations. Steve did not need every part of the process explained to him. He already understood some of the disorientation, the imbalance of resources, and the difficulty of reconciling what a person believes happened with the official narrative that emerges from a courtroom.
After my trial, I was also introduced to the White Collar Support Group, a community founded by Jeff Grant for people and families navigating the white-collar justice system. The group meets regularly and includes people at many different stages: some under investigation, some awaiting sentencing, some preparing for incarceration, and others rebuilding years after release.
I have not attended as consistently as Steve, but the conversations I have heard have mattered.
The people in the group do not all have the same exact story. They do not all make the same claims about their cases, and I would not assume that every person’s interpretation of what happened is correct simply because the experience was painful.
Still, certain concerns come up repeatedly.
People talk about the pressure created by the difference between accepting a plea and risking trial. They talk about forfeiture and receiverships, the incentives offered to cooperating witnesses, the cost of mounting a defense, the resource difference between an individual and the government, long sentences, prison conditions and healthcare, and the difficulty of finding meaningful work after a conviction.
These are separate issues, and each requires more care than a paragraph can provide. Some may reflect necessary tools being applied imperfectly. Others may involve deeper flaws in how the system is structured. I am still learning how to distinguish between those possibilities.
The numbers provide some context, although they cannot explain individual decisions. Among the federal cases reported to the United States Sentencing Commission for fiscal year 2025, 98 percent resulted in guilty pleas. Trials accounted for the remainder.
That statistic does not tell us why any particular defendant pleaded guilty. It does not tell us who was guilty, who believed they were innocent, or whether a plea represented acceptance, strategy, fear, exhaustion (financially, mentally and emotionally), or some combination of those things.
It does show that the federal criminal justice system operates overwhelmingly through pleas rather than trials.
Before experiencing the system, I probably would have assumed that a person who believed he was innocent would simply go to trial and let a jury decide. I now understand why that decision is not simple. The longer sentence after losing at trial (“trial tax”), the financial cost of continuing, the uncertainty of what a jury will believe, and the effect on a family all become part of the calculation.
Recognizing those pressures does not require assuming that every prosecution is unjust. It requires acknowledging that the structure of the system shapes decisions long before a jury enters the courtroom.
Steve has carried ideas about criminal justice reform for years. Some of those ideas developed during his incarceration. Others have grown through the relationships he has formed since returning home, including relationships within the White Collar Support Group.
Those ideas are now beginning to take form through the Justice Restoration Foundation.
The organization is still being built and is in its infancy. Its intended work includes research, public education, storytelling, restoration resources, and advocacy. One part of that work, the Pay to Play Project, is being developed as a research and accountability initiative.
The research matters because personal accounts alone are easy to dismiss. Questions about the cost of incarceration, recidivism, alternatives to prison, proportional sentencing, and the effects of incarceration on families need evidence behind them.
The stories matter for a different reason. Statistics can identify patterns, but they cannot fully show what a system does to a person, a marriage, children, a business, or a community. At the same time, stories have to be handled carefully. A reform organization cannot simply collect grievances and treat every claim as established fact. Credibility will depend on documentation, restraint, and a willingness to follow evidence wherever it leads.
That may be one of the more difficult parts of this work.
Many justice-impacted people have useful skills and hard-earned knowledge. Some were lawyers, executives, financial professionals, entrepreneurs, or specialists in other fields before their convictions. Afterward, those abilities may be overlooked because the conviction becomes the first and sometimes only thing others see.
The foundation is beginning to bring some of those people together. I do not yet know what this community will produce. I do see value in creating a place where experience can be examined, documented, and converted into constructive work rather than remaining private frustration.
My first contribution is building the foundation’s website.
That is familiar ground for me. I know how to take an emerging idea, organize it, and give it a structure that other people can begin to use. The website is not the work itself, but it creates a place for the work to gather: research, stories, resources, public education, and ways for people to participate.
There is still a great deal that has not been decided. The organization itself is still taking shape. Its priorities will become more focused. Research standards will need to be established. Stories will need to be verified and handled responsibly. Reform ideas will need to be translated into proposals that people outside the justice-impacted community can understand and evaluate.
Public understanding matters.
It is easy to dismiss criticism of the justice system when it comes only from people who have been convicted. Some readers will assume that any criticism is merely an attempt to avoid responsibility. In some cases, it may be. In others, people may be describing real structural problems that are difficult to see from the outside.
The challenge is to tell the difference.
That will require more than anger, certainty, or a collection of dramatic stories. It will require evidence, patience, credibility, and participation from people who have not personally experienced the system.
I do not know what the Justice Restoration Foundation will become. I also do not know how my own story will ultimately unfold or what my role in this work will look like over time.
For now, I know that I was introduced to Steve because someone thought he could help me through a difficult season. We became close friends and somewhere along the way, that relationship began pointing toward work that extends beyond either of our individual cases.
Building the website was one small part of that work.
I am paying attention to what comes next.
P.S. I just launched a bunch of new personal sites and I'd love if you could check out these sites:
robert.lederhilger.org --> My Official Profile
www.lederhilger.org --> My Central Hub of Projects
robertlederhilger.com --> My Resume
www.roblederhilger.com --> My Speaking/Consulting Website