As you likely know by now,
a federal jury deadlocked last week on all three corruption charges against
Sen. Emil Jones III, D-Chicago. U.S. District Judge Andrea Wood declared a
mistrial after polling individual jurors and arriving at the conclusion that they
could not possibly reach a verdict.
When you think of the
Chicago U.S. Attorney’s legendary Public Corruption & Organized Crime Unit,
the thing that immediately comes to mind is its hugely successful conviction
rate – mid-to-high 90 percentile. But the unit has run into some serious
trouble lately.
In the past seven months,
the U.S. Attorney’s office has prosecuted 37 public corruption charges against
four defendants – former AT&T President Paul La Schiazza, accused of
bribing former House Speaker Michael Madigan; Madigan himself; Madigan’s top
adviser Mike McClain and Jones.
The juries in those trials
voted to acquit on seven charges (all Madigan) and deadlocked on another 20
charges.
Just 10 of those 37
charges have so far resulted in guilty verdicts (all Madigan), for a paltry 27%
initial conviction rate – or 25% if you’re only counting the number of
defendants.
Some of these charges
could be prosecuted again, of course, and La Schiazza is scheduled for a
retrial in early June. But an initial 27% conviction rate demands some serious
introspection from the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s office. They obviously need
to build better cases and then more competently prosecute them.
Like the La Schiazza case,
the charges against Jones seemed to be too much of a stretch. The federal
government’s mole, red-light camera company SafeSpeed’s co-founder Omar Maani,
pushed Jones to come up with a dollar amount to contribute ahead of the
senator’s campaign fundraiser. After Jones finally told Maani, “you can raise
me five grand” and then asked for a job for his former intern, the mole turned
the conversation to Jones’ legislative proposal.
A month later, Jones tried
telling the Maani that he didn’t necessarily have to cover $5,000 worth of
expenses for a job fair – the workaround the FBI’s mole had asked the senator
to come up with – but Maani cut him off before Jones could finish his sentence.
More importantly, the
money never changed hands and Jones never amended the bill that Maani was so
concerned with. I could easily see why the jury would be divided.
The whole thing has also
felt sloppy and slip-shod ever since the trial began.
Sometimes, the errors were
small. One of the federal prosecutors didn’t seem to understand how Jones arrived
in the Senate. The prosecutor, for example, believed Jones was appointed to
replace his father, former Senate President Emil Jones, but the senator was
actually named to the ballot when his dad dropped out of the race.
The prosecution’s star
witness, its mole Maani, bragged to the jury that he had been bribing
politicians since his 20s, and told the jury that he gave $23,000 cash to a
suburban mayor via one of the most influential Democratic attorneys in Cook
County (neither of them have ever been charged). The alleged cash-giveaway was
intended to show Maani’s “appreciation.”
Maani was probably not the
best witness, to say the least, particularly since the G had no other real
evidence indicating a pattern of corruption by Jones. The feds have never said
why they chose to target Jones.
The overtly familiar,
late-night phone texting evidence the feds introduced between Jones and his
former male intern appeared, in my opinion, to try and out the Senator as gay
and seemed like a tactic from a dark, bygone era.
Even so, as Judge Wood
rightly reminded Jones at the end of the proceedings last week, he was not
acquitted. His bond terms are still in place. The feds could come at him again
in a new trial.
But before the U.S.
Attorney’s office makes its decision about whether to retry Jones or not, the
top brass needs to figure out why they have had such a miserably low initial
conviction rate lately.
I want as many public
corruption convictions as possible. Lock them up if they truly deserve it. But
confidence is undermined when the conviction rate falls so low.
Do better, please.