Former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman (D) was convicted on seven counts of public corruption last year. And he’s scheduled to be sentenced on June 26th. The Times today has an article about Siegelman’s attempts to stay out of prison and, in particular, the fact that his defense has now come forward with an affidavit from an attorney which arguably places his prosecution into the context of the US Attorney Purge and the larger politicization it was a part of.
The relevant passage of the pieces states …
Now they have an affidavit from a lawyer who says she heard a top Republican operative in Alabama boast in 2002 that the United States attorneys in Alabama would âtake careâ of Mr. Siegelman. The operative, William Canary, is married to the United States attorney in Montgomery, Leura G. Canary. Mr. Canary, who heads the Business Council of Alabama, was an informal adviser to Bob Riley, a Republican, who defeated Mr. Siegelman in 2002.
Earlier, Mr. Canary worked in the White House under President Bushâs father and has close ties to Karl Rove, Mr. Bushâs top political strategist.
In the affidavit, the lawyer, Jill Simpson, said Mr. Canaryâs remark was made in a conference call with her and Rob Riley, Governor Rileyâs son and campaign manager.
Ms. Simpson said Mr. Canary assured the younger Mr. Riley that âhis girls would take care ofâ Mr. Siegelman before he had a chance to run for the governorâs seat in 2006 and identified âhis girlsâ as Leura Canary and Alice Martin, the United States attorney in Birmingham.
Now, on the other side of the equation is the fact that Canary recused herself from the case in response to Siegelman’s complaints and the case was run by a career prosecutor who says he ran the whole show by himself with no input from Canary.
But let’s set that aside for a second. Federal prosecutors are asking the judge to sentence Siegelman to 30 years in prison. Thirty years!
Now, given my focus on public corruption in the last few years, far be it from me to call for leniency on crooked pols. But this strikes me as wildly out of line with the sentences I’ve seen in the last couple years. For some context, Siegelman was acquitted on 25 counts and convicted on seven. With those charges Siegelman didn’t pocket any money himself but rather, in the words of the Times, persuaded a wealthy businessman “to pay $500,000 to retire the debt of a political group that had campaigned to win voter approval for a state lottery.”
Compare this to Duke Cunningham, perhaps the most brazen and audacious bribetaker in recent decades. Duke to cash payments from multiple federal contractors in exchange for securing defense contracts. Duke got eight years and four months in prison. Duke pleaded out, which probably took some time off his sentence. But nothing Siegelman was convicted of seems even remotely in Duke’s league and yet they want to give him a sentence almost four times as long?
What am I missing?
