Legal News

Scruggs to Stay Grounded in Bluegrass State

By Ashby Jones

Last time we wrote about famed plaintiffs lawyer Dickie Scruggs — specifically, when he received his five-year sentence for conspiring to bribe Mississippi judge Henry Lackey — we got a surprising number of emails asking where Scruggs would serve his time. Well, according to the AP story just out, here’s our answer: the Federal Correctional Institution in Ashland, Kentucky.

Ashland was not Scruggs’s first choice. That honor was bestowed upon the Federal Prison Camp in Pensacola, Florida, but the request was denied. Scruggs, who was a Navy fighter pilot for several years way back when, still has a pilot’s license, something that inmates in the Pensacola facility are prohibited from having, as the prison is located at Saufley Field, a base that is part of the Pensacola Naval Air Station. (We’re not sure why this is a problem, necessarily, but we suppose we could invent a scenario in which Scruggs digs through the prison wall with a sharpened spoon and hijacks a nearby jet.) Here’s a story on the denial of the Pensacola request from the Biloxi Sun-Herald.

Co-defendants Zach Scruggs and Sid Backstrom, who also pleaded guilty to crimes related to the bribery scheme, will serve their time in Pensacola and Forrest City, Arkansas, respectively.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on July 23, 2008 (boomark / email).