By Felicia Fonseca/
Associated Press
A former archivist at Los Alamos National Laboratory was sentenced Thursday to two years' probation.
U.S. Magistrate Lorenzo Garcia turned down the Department of Energy's request that Jessica Quintana be required to pay restitution.
The DOE had asked him to order her to pay $384,150.
But Garcia said not only did Quintana have no means to pay that amount, "All the other costs appear to be costs that came in the aftermath of this incident and I do not view those to be directly related to the conduct of Ms. Quintana.''
Quintana pleaded guilty in May to a single misdemeanor count of negligent handling of classified documents for taking secret data home from the nuclear weapons facility.
She apologized to the court, saying she knew there was a lack of security at Los Alamos and took advantage of it.
"If I could go back and do it, it wouldn't ever cross my mind,'' she said. "There's nobody to blame but myself.''
Assistant U.S. Attorney Paula Burnett said she had wanted to make sure Quintana admitted responsibility, and said she believed the woman had done so.
Burnett would not comment on the sentence. However, prosecutors had not opposed Quintana's request to be sentenced only to probation.
Quintana's attorney, Stephen Aarons, has said she was working for a lab contractor converting documents to an electronic format and took them home to catch up on her work. According to her plea agreement, she took classified documents and computer files from a lab vault, put them in her backpack and took them home.
Police found the data — on a portable computer drive and in about 200 pages of paper documents — last October during a drug bust aimed at her roommate.
Quintana had been laid off by the contractor before police found the documents.
The judge ordered her to refrain from alcohol or drugs, stay away from bars and to submit to searches of her personal property or vehicle.
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