Bush appointee judge doesn’t think much of the president’s jurisprudence …
A lawyer who admitted leaking grand jury transcripts about athletes’ steroid use to The Chronicle was sentenced to 21/2 years in prison Thursday by a federal judge who upbraided President Bush for commuting the sentence of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the former vice presidential aide who faced an identical prison term on nearly identical charges.
“Under the president’s reasoning, any white-collar defendant should receive no jail time, regardless of the reprehensibility of the crime,” U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White, a Bush appointee, said before sentencing attorney Troy Ellerman to prison.
Ellerman’s lawyer, in seeking a lesser sentence, had cited Bush’s July 2 decision to commute the prison sentence for Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff. Libby was convicted of lying to federal agents and a grand jury investigating the leak of a CIA operative’s identity.
Perhaps there’s some appropriateness, in as much as that in the decision that put the president in office — Bush v. Gore — the Supreme Court said that decision was a one-off reasoning which shouldn’t be held to have applicability in any other cases. Same with Scooter justice.
