AUBURN – A Westbrook woman who spent $18,000 of the nearly $162,000 she stole from a bank on a gambling trip to Foxwoods Resort is appealing her sentence.

Diana L. Moynihan-Stevens, 34, pleaded guilty to theft by unauthorized taking, a Class B felony. She was sentenced last summer in Androscoggin County Superior Court to five years in prison with all but 18 months suspended, plus three years of probation.

Court records showed she also spent:

• $8,000 on a trip to Jamaica;

• $9,000 on a car;

• $8,000 on furniture;

• $3,000 on a computer; and

• $3,000 on Christmas gifts.

In her appeal, she said the judge misapplied state law in determining her basic sentence and was wrong in setting her maximum sentence after considering factors that would lower or raise the basic sentence. The judge also should have suspended a greater portion of the final sentence, she said.

Moynihan-Stevens was ordered to pay back $96,434 after serving her prison sentence. She already had returned $65,000.

She worked at TD Banknorth in Auburn in 2005 when bank officials notified local police of an internal theft, court records showed. Bank officials discovered she had embezzled $161,865.78 from customers’ accounts over a six-month period. The bank reimbursed its customers for the stolen money, according to records.

Confronted by bank officials, she admitted stealing the money and repaid all but $96,434.80. She told police how she withdrew the money from customers’ accounts.

Assistant District Attorney Craig Turner told the judge that the state rarely sees embezzling cases totaling such large amounts of money. Moynihan-Stevens was in a position of trust and had access to unlimited funds, Turner wrote in a sentencing memorandum.

She spent most of the stolen money on “luxury” items, not on medical bills or efforts to save the family home, Turner wrote.

George Hess, the court-appointed attorney for Moynihan-Stevens, wrote to the judge, saying his client was a mother of three young children, divorced and has a high school education. She was diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and is on medication for that condition as well as depression.

In a letter to the judge, Moynihan-Stevens wrote that she was “an emotional disaster.” Instead of dulling her emotional pain with drugs or booze, she used money as solace. “The only time I felt happy was when I was buying something, even though after the happiness wore off, I felt even lower than before,” she wrote. “I know that, obviously, everyone likes to buy nice things, but for me it became an addiction.”

With the help of medication and family support, she has “changed so much” in the three intervening years, she wrote.

She asked that she not be put in jail because of the harm it would do to her children.