The Strange Case of an Imprisoned Alabama Governor--Editorial

Source: The New York Times, nytimes.com
September 10, 2007
Editorial Observer
By ADAM COHEN

Alberto Gonzales is out as attorney general, but there is still a lot of questionable Justice Department activity for Congress to sort through. The imprisonment of Don Siegelman, a former Democratic governor of Alabama, should be at the top of the list. Jill Simpson, an Alabama lawyer and Republican operative, is heading to Washington this week to tell Congressional investigators that she heard prominent Republicans plotting to use the United States attorneys’ offices to remove Mr. Siegelman as a political threat. The case should be the focus of a probing Congressional hearing this fall.

Mr. Siegelman was a major frustration to Alabama Republicans. The state is bright red, but Mr. Siegelman managed to win the governorship in 1998 with 57 percent of the vote. He was defeated for re-election in 2002 under suspicious circumstances. In the initial returns, Mr. Siegelman appeared to have won by a razor-thin margin. But a late-night change in the tallies in Republican Baldwin County gave the current governor, Bob Riley, a victory of a little more than 3,000 votes out of 1.3 million cast.

Mr. Siegelman has charged that the votes were intentionally shifted by a Republican operative. James Gundlach, an Auburn University professor, did a statistical analysis of the returns and found that the final numbers were clearly the result of intentional manipulation. Mr. Siegelman wanted to take back the governorship in 2006, but his indictment made it impossible.

If Ms. Simpson is telling the truth, she provides important support for Mr. Siegelman’s claim that his prosecution was political. In a sworn affidavit, she says she was on a phone call in November 2002 with Governor Riley’s son, Rob Riley, and Bill Canary, a Republican political operative whose wife, Leura Canary, is the United States attorney for Montgomery. According to Ms. Simpson, they were discussing the political threat Mr. Siegelman posed, and Mr. Canary said his “girls” — his wife and Alice Martin, the United States Attorney in Birmingham — would take care of Mr. Siegelman. Ms. Simpson said Mr. Canary also said the case had been discussed with Karl Rove.

Ms. Martin’s office prosecuted Mr. Siegelman, but the case fell apart after a federal judge cast doubt on the charges. Ms. Canary’s office then convicted him of charges for which he was sentenced to seven years in prison.

In addition to the phone call, which has been reported, Ms. Simpson says she will tell House investigators about a second conversation with Rob Riley. In late January or early February of 2005, she says, in his Birmingham office, Mr. Riley told her that Mr. Siegelman would be re-indicted in Montgomery. He was indicted by Ms. Canary’s office in May 2005, and tried in May 2006, one month before the Democratic primary for governor. Mr. Riley denies that the conversation occurred.

There are other red flags, besides Ms. Simpson’s testimony. Mr. Siegelman was convicted of appointing the businessman Richard Scrushy to a state hospital board in exchange for a contribution to a campaign for a state lottery to fund education. Elected officials, from the president down, appoint people who contribute directly to their campaigns without facing criminal charges.

Decisions about whether to bring this sort of public corruption case are extremely sensitive. A prosecutor must examine an official’s state of mind and decide if he intended the appointment to be in exchange for the contribution, or if he simply ended up appointing a contributor. The extraordinary sensitivity of these cases — and their ability to change the political balance of power in the country — makes it critical that prosecutors be nonpolitical and above reproach. In the current Justice Department, they have not been.

Mr. Siegelman’s case has disturbing parallels to the prosecution of Georgia Thompson, the Wisconsin civil servant wrongly convicted by the Justice Department of awarding a state contract to a Democratic contributor. Prosecutors tried to get Ms. Thompson, who spent four months in jail before being freed by an appeals court, to testify against Jim Doyle, the state’s Democratic governor.

Ms. Thompson refused — because, she made clear, there was no crime to implicate him in. But her trial was during his re-election campaign, and her conviction was used in anti-Doyle attack ads. It’s too early to say that her case and Mr. Siegelman’s were brought simply to elect Republican governors, but there is certainly evidence that they may have been.

The Bush administration insists that the United States attorney scandal is a non-scandal. But the Siegelman and Thompson cases are a reminder that when the power of the state to imprison people is put in the wrong hands, lives can be ruined and democracy can be threatened. Since the Justice Department refuses to appoint an independent prosecutor to examine whether these and other cases were politicized, Congress must provide the scrutiny.