Jesus Christ

I wonder if Rod Dreher is similarly "shocked" by this news. 

Alabama Sheriff Starves Inmates

In the category of WTF:

The prisoners in the Morgan County jail here were always hungry. The sheriff, meanwhile, was getting a little richer. Alabama law allowed it: the chief lawman could go light on prisoners’ meals and pocket the leftover change.

And that is just what the sheriff, Greg Bartlett, did, to the tune of $212,000 over the last three years, despite a state food allowance of only $1.75 per prisoner per day.

In the view of a federal judge, who heard testimony from the hungry inmates, the sheriff was in “blatant” violation of past agreements that his prisoners be properly cared for.

“There was undisputed evidence that most of the inmates had lost significant weight,” the judge, U. W. Clemon of Federal District Court in Birmingham, said Thursday in an interview. “I could not ignore them.”

The sheriff’s defenders, like Mr. Timmons, said Sheriff Bartlett, who told the court his salary was about $64,000, was merely following the law — Alabama law.

“He has not violated any laws of the state of Alabama,” Mr. Timmons said. “Everything he has done is by the rules, including the feeding allowance.”

But that was the whole problem, in Judge Clemon’s view. An unusual statute here dating from the early decades of the 20th century allows the state’s sheriffs to keep for themselves whatever money is left over after they feed their prisoners. The money allotted by the state is little enough — $1.75 a day per prisoner — but the incentive to skimp is obvious.

That is what the sheriff did, Judge Clemon found. As Mr. Bartlett’s wallet got fatter, according to testimony, the prisoners got thinner and thinner. One testified to losing 30 pounds in the brick jail by the railroad tracks in this quiet courthouse town of clean and empty streets near the Tennessee border.

The judge expressed no regret about sending Mr. Bartlett to jail. The Alabama law is “almost an invitation to criminality,” he said in the interview. Sheriffs, he said, “have a direct pecuniary interest in not feeding inmates.”

With precision and some wonder, Judge Clemon, who is retiring shortly, recounted a typical inmate lunch here: “Two peanut butter sandwiches, with small amounts of peanut butter, chips, and flavored water.” Hunger pains were not uncommon.

One inmate interviewed from the jail, William Draper, said he had lost 15 pounds since his incarceration on marijuana trafficking charges in October. “Yeah, you stay hungry,” Mr. Draper said. “Hunger is something you live with.”

Inmates were forced to supplement the meager meals with purchases at the high-priced jail store, he said. “We have clients who are indigent who are very, very thin,” said Ms. Velez. Some spend as much as $100 a week at the store, a severe burden for their often impoverished families.

“If you can’t catch store, you’ll starve to death,” Mr. Draper said. Complaints, he said, were met with cold stares from the guards: “They look at you like, ‘you’ve got to deal with it,’ ” he said.

I don't want to hear any nonsense about how these guys are criminals and aren't entitled to a decent meal. We don't starve people in this country for being convicted of a crime, and I can't believe any state in America, even Alabama, thinks its okay for a public official to keep for himself money that is allocated for the service he oversees. And I couldn't care less that it was "legal" (if a violation of these prisoner's constitutional rights); what this guy did was wrong, and he knew it.

Rove Linked to Siegelman Case

It has been widely assumed by critics of the Siegelman prosecution that Karl Rove's dark hand was present in the machinations of DOJ attorneys who tried and had the former governor of Alabama convicted on bribery charges. Now one of the lawyers who worked on the case has testified in a sworn deposition before a House committee that she was told that Rove was directly involved in the prosecution:

In a closed-door interview with committee staff, Simpson recalled how Rob Riley, current Gov. Bob Riley’s (R) son, told her about Rove’s role in a plan to prosecute Siegelman if he did not back down from contesting the 2001 gubernatorial election results that handed the office to Riley.

According to the transcript, Simpson described a 2005 conversation with Rob Riley, who told her that Rove had contacted the Public Integrity Section of the Department of Justice to press for further prosecution of Siegelman. She said Rob Riley also recounted how the case would be assigned to a federal judge who “hated” Siegelman and would “hang Don Siegelman.”

The Birmingham News reported Tuesday that Simpson’s latest account differs from a previous sworn statement she gave that Siegelman dropped a recount in 2002 because a supporter planted an opponent’s campaign signs at a Ku Klux Klan rally. She amended her story when discussing the matter with congressional staffers to add that Siegelman dropped his challenge of Bob Riley’s victory after learning about the campaign signs and after being promised that the federal investigation of his administration would end.

Of course, there are shenanigans at work here. The transcript of Simpson's testimony was apparently leaked by GOP staffers to a reporter in the Birmingham News, a publication that Scott Horton has repeatedly lambasted for it's pro-Republican stances and over-the-top efforts to downplay the scandal:

Early yesterday, a contact on the G.O.P. staff of the House Judiciary Committee told me that her colleagues had taken a step to attempt to pre-empt the hearings that the Committee had originally scheduled for Thursday (now postponed), at which the Siegelman prosecution will appear center stage. They were, she told me, going to use a time-honored technique: the interview transcripts would be leaked to a reporter “who can be trusted to get our message across.” That is, not a real reporter, but a partisan attack animal. I wondered for a second just who the G.O.P.’s attack dog would be. But in fact, it didn’t take much effort, since it’s been clear for many months exactly who in the press could be counted upon to present Republican Party propaganda in the guise of a news story. And then, in a matter of only a few hours, the story appeared, just where I knew it would, in the pages of the Birmingham News.

Which, predictably, spun the report in such a way as to point out alleged flaws in Simpson's testimony, as the Hill report above makes clear and as Horton explains in the post I quote from above.

If these GOP staffers were hoping to pre-empt the inevitable press attention this story would get, they failed. Here's Time on the story:

If Simpson’s version of events is accurate, it would show direct political involvement by the White House in federal prosecutions — a charge leveled by Administration critics in connection with the U.S. attorney scandal that led to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

And that indeed, is the nut of this extremely damaging allegation. And as Horton makes clear in this post, Simpson has the goods to refute claims by other participants in the sham prosecution that Rove and the White House had nothing to do with the case.

I can't summarize what this damning allegation means anymore effectively than Horton does, so here's his conclusion:

We are one step closer to understanding why Karl Rove left the White House, and perhaps also why Alberto Gonzales stepped down as attorney general. The Siegelman case is emerging, as we predicted, as the most damning exhibit yet in the story of the Bush Administration’s use of the Justice Department as a partisan political tool.

Indeed, this story appears to be slowly but inexorably climbing all the way to the top.

Political Prosecution in Alabama

I've blogged a few times about the prosecution of Democratic candidate for governer of Alabama, Don Siegelman. That blogging has almost entirely consisted of linking to Scott Horton over at Harper's, who has done more work than anyone else in uncovering the sordid links between Karl Rove, the GOP machine and the prosecutors in Siegelman's case. Via to John Cole, I see that the story has finally gotten some mainstream treatment in pages of Time magazine (and it appears 60 Minutes will be doing a show on the story as well.) According to time, they've obtained State and FBI investigatory documents that contain the testimony of Clayton Young Jr., their primary witness against Siegelman, testimony that contains extraordinary allegations of corruption involving Republican lawmakers, allegations that were completely ignored by prosecutors. So far the DOJ has refused to hand over any of these records to Democrats in Congress, and you'll see why. Here are some samples:

Young testified that he had furnished Siegelman with an all-terrain vehicle and a motorcycle, lavishing money on the Governor and his aides. But he was an equal-opportunity influence monger. Early in the investigation, in November 2001, Young announced that five years earlier, he "personally provided [Senator Jeff] Sessions with cash campaign contributions," according to an FBI memo of the interview. Prosecutors didn't follow up that surprising statement with questions, but Young volunteered more. The memo adds that "on one occasion he [Young] provided Session [sic] with $5,000 to $7,000 using two intermediaries," one of whom held a senior position with Sessions' campaign. On another occasion, the FBI records show, Young talked about providing "$10,000 to $15,000 to Session [sic]. Young had his secretaries and friends write checks to the Sessions campaign and Young reimbursed the secretaries and friends for their contributions."

If true, Young's statements describe political money laundering that would be a clear violation of federal law. In 1996, when Young said he had made the contributions, it was illegal to give a candidate more than $1,000 for a primary or general campaign. None of the individuals Young named as his intermediaries in making the donations are listed in Federal Election Commission records as contributors to Sessions' 1996 U.S. Senate race. "We have on record a $1,000 contribution from Mr. Young during the 1996 election cycle and no record of any other contribution from him," says a spokesman for Sessions.

Young also openly offered details about what he said were donations totaling between $12,000 and $15,000 to Pryor's campaign for state attorney general. Once again, Young had used the friends-and-colleagues maneuver. According to the FBI record, "Young advised that during Pryor's 1998 campaign, he contributed money through other individuals." Young named four people who "all wrote checks to Pryor's campaign and were reimbursed by Young for their contributions." At one point in the conversation, Young seemed particularly eager to tell all. "This was not just for the Governor's [Siegelman's] campaign," he told investigators. "It was also for the attorney general's campaign ... I gave you the example of five checks totaling $25,000. If I was there, I would write them out or just sign them, and they would fill in who it was to or whatever." According to Young, a top official on Pryor's campaign "would call and say, 'I need money for this, this or this,'" and Young would take care of the request.

This evidence was heard by lawyers from U.S. Attorney Canary's office, representatives of Alabama's Republican attorney general and an attorney from the Justice Department's public-integrity unit in Washington. But in an unusual exercise of prosecutorial discretion, nearly all the payments and donations went uninvestigated. And when Siegelman's defense team, which had obtained Young's statements amid tens of thousands of documents provided in discovery, raised his accusations briefly in court, a judge quickly ruled them irrelevant.

Incredible. Outrageous. There are hardly words to describe what the prosecutors did in this case. The allegations that Young made regarded crimes in violation of election law, and they dismissed them because they were inconvenient and not of interest in the persecution (no, I didn't mis-type that) of Siegelman. As to that judge? Well, Horton will tell you all about him as well. No one's hands are clean in this sordid business, and if justice is to be served, then the prosecutors involved in this case should be looking at time behind bars for their perversion and betrayal of justice.