Last night, 60 Minutes aired an investigation that they did on the conviction of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman on charges of bribery. The video can be found here: http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/i_video/main500251.shtml?id=3870545n.
They do a great job at distilling the information into about a 13 minutes spot. Basically, Siegelman was a popular Democrat governing a usually Republican state. In 2006, however, he was tried and convicted on charges of bribery and later sentenced to seven years in prison.
Here's the catch: 60 Minutes goes back through the whole history of the investigation and interviews some key players in this. One is Jill Simpson, a Republican lawyer who worked with William Canary, a Republican who worked on Siegelman's opponent's campaign, during this period. She claims to have heard Canary say that he was sicking the Justice Department on Siegelman, saying that his "girls" would take care of him, referring to his wife, US Attorney Leura Canary, and another US Attorney in Alabama.
During the actual trial and investigation of the now former governor, Leura was the one running that case until objections about her ties to Siegelman's political opponent forced her to recuse herself and let her assitants handle it instead.
And that's just one red flag on this case that has caused " 52 former state attorneys-general, of both parties" (1) to call for this conviction to be investigated by Congress. Another big one is that the prosecution's star witness, a man who himself was charged wtih embezzling without the governor's knowledge and claimed to have seen the said bribe, was told to write his statement down several times in order to get his story straight. These notes were never submitted to the defense, though by law they should have been. Furthermore, the check this witness claims to have seen (that went toward a state lottery system, not into the governor's pocket) was cut several days after he claimed to have seen the governor walking out of the meeting with it.
The whole situation stinks of corruption and even worse, there was apparently some "technical difficulties" that caused blackouts to two news stations in Alabama just as they were about to air the program (2). This just makes me even more sure that we need some drastic changes in the way this country works. The fact that an innocent man may have been put into jail essentially for nothing more than his political affiliation is simply tragic.
(1) Said in the linked video and quoted again here: http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/02/25/60-minutes-the-prosecution-of-d...
(2) http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/02/todays_must_read_283.p...
