Personal Injury Law

HELP! Sylvia Struggling With Breast Cancer Needs Paul - A Story of Justice Gone Wrong!

By Wayne Parsons

Sylvia has breast cancer and she is all alone. Her husband Paul is in prison. We need to call evreryone we know and raise the volume to a level where they will let Paul rush to his wife's side and hold her hand through this ordeal. Before you click off, this is a story that everyone should read and everyone should shout about. Sylvia can't shout and she never was a shouter. Sylvia is sweet and vulnerable. If you care about injustice you have happened upon a place where you can wage in and make a difference.

But timing is everything with cancer. My beautiful wife Valerie died of cancre last year. I was with her all the way. I cannot imagine Sylvia going through her battle with this devastating disease all alone. Paul is a victim of a political prosecution. That also infuriates me. The article below from Harpers will make you angry.

We don't have to stand by and look at injustice and think that there is nothing we can do. This is America. When injustice happens we stand up to it. But do you care enough to do something? Will anyone even read this? I know that you care.

Please read this:

A Minor Injustice: Why Paul Minor?

By Scott Horton

A Minor Injustice

By Scott Horton

Alexandre Dumas’s most popular novel, The Count of Monte Cristo, revolves around the narrative of Edmond Dantès, the captain of a merchant vessel who visits Napoleon on the isle of Elba and is entrusted by the deposed emperor with a letter to a dear friend in Paris. On his return to Marseilles, Dantès sets out to see his betrothed Mercédès. He is unaware that he has a competitor for Mercédès’s affections in Fernand Mondego, who has learned of his dealings with Napoleon and has denounced him to the prosecutor, Villefort. Though he is at first treated kindly by the prosecutor, suddenly Dantès finds himself gagged, put in irons and hauled off to the notorious island prison of the Château d’If, there to rot for the rest of his life. What Dantès does not know is that the letter that Napoleon entrusted to him was addressed to Villefort’s own father. Dantès therefore had evidence which would ruin the ambitious young prosecutor’s career—and thus the prosecutor struck pre-emptively, coldly, and unethically.

Dumas’s novel is one of the greatest masterworks of nineteenth century literature, combining a compelling plot with adventure, high drama, and sufficient substance to sail the ship into the literary canon. At its core is the everlasting conflict between on one side ambition, greed, and power and on the other the duties of love and justice. This struggle continues to the novel’s end.

It is a tale of Dantès’s struggle for justice against a corrupted prosecutor who did him wrong in order to advance his career. But it is also a struggle for the soul of Edmond Dantès: will he be deformed by his own desires for revenge, or will he manage to let the sunlight of justice shine into his own character?

I have often wondered how The Count of Monte Cristo could be converted into a novel set in America in the modern age. But I think I’ve found the material: the modern American Edmond Dantès is named Paul Minor, a man today in prison in the Mississippi Gulf Coast. We’ll study his tale in some depth in the coming weeks, and in it you will find the essence of Dumas’s great venture. It is a story of high politics, of prosecutors who are moved not by a commitment to justice but a craving for raw power and the advancement of careers. It is also a story of corrupt judges and corrupted justice, but in the great Dumas tradition, we will learn that the stories of corrupt judges and justice are not, in the end, those spun on the surface and fanned in the newspapers—for there is a true inner story which is quite different, involving a reversal of expectations.

And we lay this tale on the sandy beaches of the Gulf of Mexico, a stone’s throw from the great creole metropolis of New Orleans. In that venue is a point of historical intersection. We should remember that the great novelist Alexandre Dumas père sprang from this very environment. He was a creole, his grandfather had served as the French quartermaster general in Haiti, and his grandmother Marie-Césette was a Black slave of legendary beauty. The story we will cast here is of a different time, a different culture, woven in a different language. But judge for yourself: is it truly so different?

In any event, I will take Dumas as my lodestar for this voyage. And as we pursue it, I remind you of the words that the abbé Faria whispers to Edmond Dantès as they communicate in the bowels of the Château d’If:

Si vous voulez découvrir le coupable, cherchez d’abord celui à qui le crime commis peut être utile! — That if you seek to discover the culprit, seek first to discover the person to whom the perpetration of that crime could be in any way advantageous.

As in Dumas’s tale let us consider that the crime may not be what the public hears as a crime—the charges leveled at the prisoner. The crime may turn out to be the prosecutor’s conduct in leveling these charges. As for Dumas, the question of who benefits from the corruption of the justice system is the key to understanding our tale. Thus I propose to start with the answer. Who profited from the injustice?

Setting the Scene
In 2000, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce launched a major effort to roll-back class-action lawsuits and other procedures that were anathema to its major corporate constituency. It identified a half-dozen states as particular problem cases in this regard: Illinois, Mississippi, Washington state, and West Virginia were high up on its list. Its tactics were well described in an important article by Jim VandeHei in the Wall Street Journal.¹1. Jim VandeHei, “Political Cover: Major Business Lobby Wins Back Its Clout By Dispensing Favors–Some Members Can Hide Behind Chamber’s Name To Pursue Private Ends–Targeting `Unfriendly’ Judges,” Wall Street Journal, Sept. 11, 2001, p. A1. The Chamber’s representatives, led by its powerhouse president, Thomas Donohue, solicited major corporate funders who were plagued by class-action suits, tort liability, and high damage awards, and asked them to fund a significant election effort designed to defeat attorneys general and judges who were viewed as friendly to the trial court bar. Not only would the corporations be anonymous in this endeavor, but the Chamber would do its best even to obscure its own identity and involvement.²2. Public Citizen, Tom Donohue U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Oversees Renegade Corporations While Pushing for Limits to Corporate Accountability, Feb. 2005.

As the Chamber pursued its furtive project, it worked hand-in-glove with local Republican parties and networks, channeling its money into the best-bet races, usually those in which a strong Republican was challenging a Democratic incumbent. It aligned itself with a cast of private-practice lawyers close to the Bush Administration and the Bush Department of Justice; several of these lawyers were to figure in short order as Bush’s prosecutors and judicial nominees, or as Republican members of Congress.

Mississippi was one of the Chamber’s battleground states. It’s a small, rural, poor state—at times ranked the poorest in the nation. But from the perspective of corporate interests concerned about “tort reform,” “excessive jury awards,” and class actions, Mississippi was close to ground zero. In no other state had the trial bar scored such stellar successes. The Mississippi plaintiff’s counsel were at the heart of a massive legal war waged on big tobacco. They had been involved in major suits involving Ford, Firestone, and a slew of other leading manufacturers and insurers.

The Mississippi trial lawyers, and the judges close to them, made a natural target for the tobacco industry and other major corporate players. The Chamber provided the means of attack. The Chamber flooded Mississippi’s judicial races in 2002 with about one million dollars. Trying to disguise the source of this money, they channeled it through the just-created Law Enforcement Alliance of America (LEAA). LEAA prepared and ran expensive, professionally-produced attack ads, although the ad time was largely booked by the Chamber of Commerce itself. Newspapers looking into LEAA found the Chamber’s fingerprints at every turn.³3. Michael Orey, “Business Targets Judicial Race in ‘Tort Mecca,’” Wall Street Journal, Oct. 30, 2002; Robert Lenzner & Matthew Miller, “Buying Justice; For Years Trial Lawyers Owned State Courts. Now Big Business Is Striking Back,” Forbes, July 21, 2003.

By national-campaign standards a million isn’t much, but for Mississippi it was an unprecedented sum. As the money came in, the incumbent judges and their allies were startled. They believed that the Chamber was violating Mississippi election laws, and they were convinced that the massive infusion of cash would essentially buy the state’s judicial elections. They set out to counter it in two ways: first they secured injunctions from Mississippi state courts to block the advertising from running. The courts in Mississippi agreed: the Chamber had engaged in a subterfuge which violated Mississippi disclosure requirements, so the advertisement was enjoined.

Enter Nino
But then the Chamber of Commerce procured its deus ex machina: it made an appeal directly to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the justice responsible for the Fifth Circuit, which included Mississippi. And Scalia dissolved the state court injunctions, authorizing the Chamber’s attack ads to go forward. The Chamber was represented in this process by a Mississippi Republican named Michael Wallace. (President Bush subsequently nominated Wallace to serve on the Fifth Circuit, but he had to withdraw when the American Bar Association found him to be “unqualified.”⁴4. Charles Lane, “Nominee Rated ‘Unqualified’ by ABA Panel,” Washington Post, May 11, 2006.) A lawyer in the campaign, who asked that his name not be used, described to me his astonishment:

One afternoon I got a call from a clerk for Justice Scalia, saying, ‘The justice is about to rule, and he wants to know if you want to be heard.’ I was astonished. I knew nothing about this application, but before we could even start to think about it, it was over. Scalia decided, without hearing us. He dissolved the Mississippi injunctions on the grounds that the Chamber’s ads were protected speech, not political advertising. And all this was done on the basis of the Chamber of Commerce’s direct approach to Scalia.

Scalia’s actions amounted to an extraordinary interference with the state rules governing the electoral process, particularly curious in light of Scalia’s commitment to a “new federalism” in which the role of the states in decisions about their own internal affairs was said to be enhanced. However, Scalia’s “new federalism” is subject to a very important corollary: it recedes whenever it clashes with the electoral interests of the G.O.P. The most striking demonstration of Scalia’s flexibility can be found in his posture in the Bush v. Gore ruling which threw the 2000 presidential election to Scalia’s friend and patron, George W. Bush. (Scalia’s own son had been involved in advising the Bush campaign, and no sooner was the new administration installed than his son landed a job as the Solicitor of Labor, the senior lawyer for the Labor Department.⁵5. Paul Krugman, “The Sons Also Rise,” New York Times, Nov. 22, 2002.)

Lawyers in Mississippi bristled over another aspect of Scalia’s behavior. Of all sitting justices, none comes within striking range of Scalia when it comes to accepting speaking engagements and trips which effectively offer free vacations at the sponsor’s expense. Many of Scalia’s travels are linked to persons and organizations closely tied to the Republican Party, most notably the Federalist Society and a number of prominent Republican donors. Scalia travels regularly down to the Mississippi delta region to go duck and turkey hunting, they note.

One such incident which he undertook jointly with Vice President Cheney received wide media attention when Scalia refused to recuse himself from decision of a critical matter involving Cheney, then provided a vote in Cheney’s favor.⁶6. Eight of the ten largest newspapers in the U.S. called on Scalia to recuse himself. He refused, publishing a 21-page memorandum defending his position. Prof. Monroe Freedman reviewed the Scalia memo in a law review article which concluded that Scalia’s arguments were “specious,” a view widely shared in the legal community. “Duck-Blind Justice: Justice Scalia’s Memorandum in the Cheney Case,” Georgetown J. Leg. Ethics, Fall 2004.

But several Mississippi lawyers have pointed out to me that on his duck-hunting trips Scalia is hosted and entertained by the same figures who were aligned in support of the Chamber of Commerce and its judicial election efforts. One of his regular shooting partners has been Mississippi Judge Charles Pickering, one of the Chamber’s favorite candidates, and Pickering’s son, a Mississippi congressman with a near-perfect record in supporting the Chamber’s program.

In 1993, Scalia authored an opinion in which he said that the Minnesota legislature and not judges should be making decisions about redrawing electoral districts. But when it came to Mississippi, and a plan which presented a serious problem for Judge Pickering’s son, another hunting partner of Scalia’s, the justice had a sudden and dramatic change of view. He decided in favor of a plan crafted by a group of Republican federal judges.⁷7. Thomas B. Edsall, “Supreme Court Rejects Redistricting Appeal: Democrats Accuse Judges, Justice Dept. of Favoritism in Mississippi Conflict,” Washington Post, Mar. 2, 2002. (Scalia is also linked in these reports to Republican Mississippi Judges Henry T. Wingate and David C. Bramlette, each of whom played a critical role in the Mississippi drama surrounding the judicial elections and the prosecutions which emerged from them.)

Even Mississippi’s rock-ribbed conservative press was scandalized by Scalia’s antics. The Jackson Clarion-Ledger editorialized: “Small world, isn’t it? . . . Even a gesture toward impartiality,” they wrote, would have stopped Scalia from ruling on the case involving his ‘hunting buddies. “Justice Scalia should have recused himself from Tuesday’s decision.”⁸8. “Redistricting: The partisan games continue . . . ,” Jackson Clarion-Ledger, Feb. 28, 2002.⁹9. “It’s hard to view Scalia as impartial,” one Mississippi lawyer told me. “He looks like a fully participating member of the enemy camp, benefiting from their largesse as he goes along.”

The Bush Justice Department had no issues with Justice Scalia’s participation in these cases. It was delighted to be able to count on his vote. But when it came to ethical issues surrounding judges in Mississippi with a reputation for being pro-plaintiff, suddenly the Justice Department’s view of ethics and the law changed quite dramatically. With Scalia backing up the Chamber’s campaign by dissolving the Mississippi court orders, the incumbents had only one other option: to scramble quickly to raise funds to match the Chamber’s spending and book their own ad time. They didn’t match the Chamber, but in the end, the incumbents were able to field their own advertising–not as professional as the Chamber’s, and not as much. But when the votes were counted, the incumbent slate of judges was largely returned, and the Chamber’s campaign in Mississippi was a surprising failure.

The Target
One man, Paul Minor, had stood in resolute opposition to the Chamber’s onslaught. A trial lawyer from the Gulf Coast area, Minor emerged as one of Mississippi’s wealthiest citizens on the strength of fees earned successfully battling big tobacco. The son of a prominent journalist known for his zealous advocacy of civil rights in the heyday of the movement, Minor served in Vietnam as an army intelligence officer, then came home to become a lawyer. He was a co-founder of South Mississippi Legal Services Corporation and a champion of the cause of the poor and racial minorities across the state, and he was a former president of the Mississippi trial lawyers association.

Minor was also an engaged partisan. He was the leading donor to the Democratic Party and a key supporter of a number of judges in contested races. As the Chamber campaigned for “tort reform,” Minor crisscrossed the state pointing to powerful out-of-state corporate interests that were behind the campaign, starting with big tobacco.¹⁰10. Jerry Mitchell, “Diaz Case Adds Fuel to Election Campaigns,” Jackson Clarion-Ledger, July 30, 2003. Today, because he took steps to counter the Chamber’s Mississippi electoral scheme, he is serving an 11-year sentence, has been fined $2.7 million, and was ordered to pay restitution in the amount of $1.5 million. Meanwhile, the Chamber of Commerce campaign, which in the view of Mississippi officials had been crafted, assembled and pursued in flagrant violation of Mississippi law, was not simply ignored, but vigorously defended as protected First Amendment “free speech.” This was a very strange, and flamboyantly partisan, view of the interests of justice.

The process that was followed matches up with Karl Rove’s master plan for reshaping the judiciary in Alabama for the benefit of big business, which Rove and his friends William Canary and Toby Roth had brilliantly implemented ten years earlier. The original goal had been to replicate the Alabama strategy next door in Mississippi–but after the effort failed, the objective appears to have changed; the goal was now to punish the Mississippi trial lawyers who took on the Chamber and won, and to dry up the campaign funding resources that were fueling the opposition to the Chamber.

Suddenly the Mississippi trial lawyers and their judicial allies found themselves facing an even hungrier and more powerful foe: the Bush White House’s Department of Justice. The absurdities of the Justice Department’s conduct were not lost on many observers. Jackson Clarion-Ledger editor David Hampton observed¹¹11. Jackson Clarion-Ledger, “The Minor Case,” Sept. 7, 2007.:

I am still not sure what they did was illegal under the weak laws governing such activities, nor am I sure the government really proved its case. It did to the jury, so that’s that, but I have my doubts as an observer. Didn’t convince me.

It is my opinion that there was too much of a political smell to this case. The extent the Republican Justice Department went to in going after a wealthy influential Democratic trial lawyer just seemed over the top. I’ve never seen anything like it. It was extraordinary.

Within a year, the Democratic Party of Mississippi saw its war chest dry up, and by the 2003-04 election cycle, Democrats had raised $450,000–compared to $4 million for the Republicans. Republicans were swept back into control of state offices, and, beginning in 2004, the new Republican administration in Jackson began quickly enacting the Chamber of Commerce’s entire agenda, starting with “tort reform.”

Bagging a Democrat

When it came to funding Democratic candidates and causes, prominent Mississippi trial lawyer Paul Minor was a go-to guy. He was a major donor to Democratic candidates for office, and he was against tort reform and staunchly opposed limiting injury awards. Between 2001 and 2004, Minor and his law firm donated over $100,000 to a range of Democratic causes, from the John Edwards campaign, to the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to the Democratic National Committee. ¹1. Richard Opel & Glen Justice, “Developing the Strategies: Fund Raising,” New York Times, July 26, 2004. The Times notes that Paul Minor was the tenth largest donor to John Edwards, with donations totaling $129,000, and it also notes that almost every major attorney donor to the Edwards campaign mysteriously became the target of an aggressive Justice Department criminal investigation. Thus in 2002, when FBI agents began looking into the campaign funding sources of Mississippi judges, Minor’s name surfaced in connection with a loan he had guaranteed to help Supreme Court Justice Oliver Diaz secure a loan for election finance.

Ultimately, Minor was convicted of honest services mail fraud on September 7, 2007. He was charged with having helped Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Oliver E. Diaz, Jr., and his family secure loans to fuel Diaz’s election campaign by providing personal guarantees. Minor also allowed Diaz to use an apartment he owned.²2. Diaz states that he used the apartment only on weekends to visit his children, who were separated from him thanks to a recent divorce, that he shared it with another renter, and that Diaz made payments for its use. Diaz’s statements on these points were corroborated by a series of other witnesses. However, none of this was noted in the charges brought by the prosecution. Indeed, the prosecutors also neglected to point out that the apartment was not solely Minor’s–a major shareholder was another prominent lawyer who had made the same sorts of loans that Minor had, and who, unlike Minor, actually had cases in front of the judges in question. The other lawyer, however, makes strong campaign contributions to the Republicans.

As the investigation began, a survey of local newspapers–particularly the Jackson Clarion-Ledger–shows that Minor and his fellow targets were under heavy assault. The local press began to print articles laden with innuendo and smear, and articles appeared accusing Minor of “corruption” based on information that was consistently sources to anonymous “sources close to the investigation.” As a practical matter this could only have come from the prosecution team. And the timing of the leaks–for instance in 2003, when Haley Barbour returned to Mississippi ready to recapture the statehouse for the G.O.P.–seemed to coincide with Republican campaign strategy. The leaks served a double purpose, however: they “poisoned the well” by predisposing the newspaper-reading citizenry to think that Minor and his colleagues were guilty; and they furnished essential fodder for the G.O.P. election effort in which high profile and prominent Democrats were constantly labeled “corrupt.” The prosecution’s case aligned with the G.O.P.’s Mississippi election strategy on another score: intimidate and dry up the trial lawyer campaign contributions which were the life’s blood of the Mississippi Democratic Party.

The Charges

The actual charges filed were almost incomprehensible. Several public integrity prosecutors with whom I conferred told me they were unfamiliar of any similar case raising charges quite like these. They were called “strange,” and “perhaps unique.” Most public corruption cases revolve on a quid pro quo: a public official is asked to do something for some form of compensation or reward. But in these cases there is no quid pro quo, and none is ever alleged. As the New York Times’s Adam Liptak observed:

The central charge against the two men is so convoluted that setting it out requires a diagram, if not a family tree: trying to influence a libel case against Mr. Minor’s father, Mr. Minor guaranteed a loan to Justice Diaz’s former wife.

Here’s my take.³3. A very detailed and meticulous review of the charges and legal issues in the Minor case has been presented in Roger Shuler’s “Mississippi Churning” series, which can be visited here. I strongly recommend it for anyone interested in the case, and one good place to start is his primer on honest services mail fraud. But I’ll give you the short version: honest service mail fraud is an effort to conjure a crime which does not exist. The “crime” here is purely political.

First, Mississippi is a state in which judges are usually first appointed by the governor, and then must achieve election in their own right. Judicial elections are supposedly nonpartisan, but the shadows of partisan interest hang heavily over the entire process. There is no rule prohibiting attorneys who practice in front of a given judge from donating to, and even advising, that judge’s campaign–these happenings are in fact commonplace and drive the entire system. Given Mississippi’s small population, it is not rare for judges and attorneys to regularly interact and maintain close friendships. Both Minor and Diaz opposed the G.O.P.’s “tort reform” project, which aimed to materially reduce the potential exposure of manufacturers to large tort verdicts. This made the two natural allies, and offers an explanation for Minor’s support of Diaz’s campaign.

Second, during the immediate period of the loan, Diaz never voted on a case in which Minor held an interest. However, two years after he accepted Minor’s loan, Diaz did join in a unanimous decision favoring Minor’s father, a prominent journalist, who was defending a libel case before the state’s Supreme Court. As we reported previously, Diaz, along with the two lower court judges, was accused of failing to report loans on financial disclosure forms, and failing to disclose to attorneys in the case before them the details of Minor’s loans. These two failings, the prosecutors argued, effectively deprived the people of Mississippi of the honest services of their judges.

But in fact, the shoe fits perfectly on the other foot. By pursuing an investigation and bringing the charges, the Justice Department was depriving the State of Mississippi of the services of these judges. In fact Oliver Diaz had to step down from the bench for a period of several years while he defended the charges brought against him. The charges were ludicrous and his acquittal was a foregone conclusion. But what was the purpose of the prosecution? To keep Diaz off the bench, and thus remove one Democratic vote, shifting the Mississippi Court’s partisan balance. Seen this way, what the Justice Department did was an assault on the political franchise of Mississippi voters and an attack on the State’s Constitution, all pursued for partisan political purposes.

But in the prosecutors’ view, Minor was guilty of participating in the scheme; hence the charges of honest services mail fraud, deprivation of honest services, and the application of the RICO act against him. An excerpt from Minor’s motion to dismiss clarifies the workings of Mississippi’s judicial politics, and the vague line drawn between contributing to a judge’s campaign and acting improperly to influence the state’s judiciary:

Those from the side of big business would say that their support for specific judges was for the purpose of changing the overall judicial philosophy of the state and not so that a specific judge would be beholden to them in any case. Those individual attorneys who supported different judges did so for the same reason. This is the tug-of-war when there are popular elections of judges in which attorneys and those with case interests can participate. In the midst of this keen political debate about Mississippi judges and the future of how elections would be influenced by outside business interests, the U.S. Attorney decided to seek an indictment converting Mr. Minor’s actions not as his desire to take part in the political process but as his attempt to corrupt judges for his own personal benefit. Again, others were not treated in this fashion, and the question remains “why?”

The first concern raised by this case is Minor’s claim, as noted in the brief above, that he was the victim of a selective prosecution.

The second is the conduct and background of the U.S. Attorney Dunnica Lampton, which adds substantial weight to Minor’s claims that he was a political victim.

And the third is the very mysterious circumstances surrounding the selection of the federal judge and the judge’s aberrational conduct in the case. As we will see, although this is a case involving charges of improperly influencing judges, in pursuit of the case the Department of Justice engaged in conduct involving the trial judge which was at best at the outermost periphery of what the canons of ethics permit. In many respects the case against Minor looks like a rehashing of the prosecution of Governor Don E. Siegelman next door in Alabama.

The Teflon Litigator

As Minor recounts it, and other lawyers with whom I spoke confirm, the idea of rushing in to support the judges who came under fire from the Chamber of Commerce started with Richard Scruggs, probably the best known and wealthiest member of the Mississippi trial lawyers bar. Scruggs, like Minor, made loans to Mississippi judges and came under investigation in the original study launched by the FBI. However, there was a critical difference. Scruggs tends to support the Republicans, not the Democrats. In 2000, for instance, he gave $250,000 to the Bush-Cheney campaign and to the G.O.P.,⁴4. Federal Election Commission Report, Sept. 15, 2000 (in addition to this donation, Scruggs has made several others, and his wife has given over $500,000 to various Republican causes). and only $20,000 to Democratic candidates.⁵5. Brian Perry, “Bad Judges,” Madison County Journal, Nov. 21, 2002. And more significantly, Scruggs was the brother-in-law of Mississippi Senator Trent Lott, who at the time was the Republican leader in the U.S. Senate.

If the conduct that Minor engaged in was unlawful, then Scruggs should also have been charged. Indeed, an outsider looking over the file would come pretty quickly to expect to see Scruggs as the lead defendant in the case. But that’s not the way U.S. Attorney Lampton and Public Integrity section head Noel Hillman saw things, and several people who have asked to remain anonymous have told me that that Lott was aggressive in acting to protect Scruggs. Indeed, FBI Agent Matthew Campbell out of the Gulfport field office is reported to have expressed disbelief that the case was pursued against the Democratic donors but dropped as against the Republican-connected Scruggs. The Biloxi Sun Herald reported⁶6. “Web of Connections,” Sun Herald, Apr. 23, 2004.:

Matthew Campbell early on was a lead agent in the judicial probe, but he was reassigned after he questioned Scruggs’ ties to Sen. Lott and Attorney General Moore. Campbell wanted to investigate Scruggs, and questioned whether Moore should be involved in the investigation.

The result: Special Agent Campbell, a forensic accountancy expert, found himself quickly reassigned. His new duty station was Guantánamo, where his accountancy skills were unlikely to be of much use, but from which he was not likely to be heard again.⁷7. “FBI Agent Reassigned After Questioning Ties in Judge-Attorney Probe,” Associated Press, May 29, 2003.

With Special Agent Campbell off the case, a new FBI agent stepped in. His name was Kevin Rust. Campaign finance records show that Rust was an active participant in and supporter of the Chamber of Commerce-supported judge who contested Justice Diaz’s seat, and who had been defeated in the 2000 election. Under FBI ethics rules, Rust should have been excluded from the case. Instead, he assumed leadership for it. Thus, this “public integrity” prosecution started with a systematic and very revealing violation of the basic rules of public integrity. And it was just one of a great many ethics infractions which were to follow.

Why did the Justice Department decide against proceeding with charges against Scruggs? If it was because of Scruggs’s connection to Trent Lott, then Senate ethics rules concerning interference with pending investigations and prosecutions were violated. Indeed, several members of Congress are now under investigation because of their abusive involvement in investigations and prosecutions of political rivals at the apparent invitation of the Bush Justice Department. The Biloxi Sun Herald quotes Lott as acknowledging having had discussions with the prosecutors about his brother-in-law’s case.⁸8. “Lott Asked Investigators About Scruggs,” Biloxi Sun Herald, May 31, 2006. Lott quickly corrected his comments as “a mistake.” But the circumstances surrounding the case leave many wondering just how mistaken the remarks might have been.

Or perhaps, following the same reasoning that the federal prosecutors used in going after Minor and his co-defendants–in which a sinister motive is imputed to every campaign contribution–the decision not to prosecute simply reflects the current protection payment necessary to secure immunity from the Bush Administration’s “public integrity” racket. A $250,000 payment into the Bush-Cheney campaign coffers apparently buys a lot of peace of mind.

U.S. Attorney Lampton never offered a coherent explanation or response to the accusations of selective prosecution. He didn’t have to. The federal judge handling the case never really entertained or ruled on the motion. I’ll look into that at a later date.

Ultimately, two trials occurred. The first resulted in a deadlocked jury. When time came for the second trial, Minor found that the judge had decided to change the rules. In the first trial, Minor had offered a great deal of exculpatory evidence. He showed that he had an established practice of making small loans and guaranteeing loans to his friends and colleagues in the legal community who couldn’t get them. This included a series of loans and loan guarantees he made over a long period of time to Black lawyers who had a notoriously difficult time securing credit from Mississippi racially conscious banks. The evidence showed that the guarantees that Minor made to the three judges here, to allow them to fund their reelection campaigns, were nothing out of character for him. It directly offset claims that his intent was corrupt. But as the second trial got under way, the presiding judge announced he had changed his mind about this evidence, and he was going to exclude it. This was a clear and conscious changing of the goal-posts in mid-game designed to help the prosecution get a conviction. And the second go-round in fact produced just that result.

It appears to me that what got Paul Minor in trouble is that he facilitated campaign finance for Diaz and for two lower court judges. In the mind of the Justice Department prosecutors, he did not give money because he supported the candidates, nor because they were his friends, nor because he agreed with their judicial philosophy. In the Justice Department’s view his donations were made in order to influence cases he had pending before the court.

At the same time, to the Bush Justice Department, it is perfectly appropriate to funnel millions of dollars from mysterious corporate donors to “pro-business” candidates via organizations set up by the Chamber of Commerce–and then to brush off the fact that these donations violated state campaign finance regulations by claiming that they were protected as “free speech.” Meanwhile, donations by trial lawyers to judges on the other side of the electoral fence–judges who threatened the constituents of the Chamber of Commerce–were perceived as corrupt. This demonstrates very clearly the two-tiered standard of justice which lies at the core of the Paul Minor prosecution. The flavor of justice dispensed depends entirely on your politics.

Mississippi’s most prominent living writer is novelist John Grisham. His thrillers–The Pelican Brief, The Client and The Testament among others–are filled with tales of corrupt prosecutors, bought judges and a handful of decent innocent citizens convinced that justice really means something. Grisham grew up in Southaven, Mississippi, and it’s often said that his novels are informed by what he saw and learned in the courthouses of the Mississippi delta. And will the case of Paul Minor figure in a Grisham novel to come? In any event, Grisham has just published a new novel called Playing for Pizza. At the launch party for his book, he was asked how he assesses the strange doings of the Bush Justice Department. “I’ve always thought that they were bad people with evil intent—and all that, it’s playing out now,” he told the Des Moines Register. “You can’t hardly look at any aspect of the government in the seven years so far that’s been run properly.”

When the last installment ran, Paul Minor was in a prison in his native Mississippi. Since then he has been moved to a new prison, in Oklahoma. There’s no doubt he will echo Grisham’s sentiments. And so will millions of other Americans.

Evan Magruder contributed to this post. In the next installments we will look at U.S. Attorney Lampton’s role in the prosecution, his own record in the area of campaign finances, and the reappearance of Public Integrity head Noel Hillman.

Full post as published by Honolulu Personal Injury Lawyer on February 02, 2009 (boomark / email).