More on another case with Alice Martin.

First, Don Siegelman, then Sue Schmitz. Now, County Commisioner Gary White.


Here is excerpt from Harper Magazine:


Martin began an investigation into some of the county officials on suspicion of receiving bribes. This produced several criminal indictments, including one against a county commissioner named Gary White. When I started questioning Martin’s role in political prosecutions, several Birmingham lawyers told me, “but of course she prosecuted Gary White, and he’s a Republican.” So the White prosecution was cited, sometimes aggressively, as evidence of Martin’s fair-handedness. But other lawyers—most of them in fact Republicans, and a couple who worked for Martin—told me, “not so fast.” There was, they warned me, something extremely unseemly about the White prosecution as well, but I would have to overturn a lot of rocks to find it.

I have been examining the White case slowly over the last couple of months. There is evidence of petty corruption presented against White, and his answers don’t always strike me as compelling.


When the jury returned a verdict against White, I wasn’t particularly surprised. But working through the case concerns mounted that the prosecution was never really about corruption in Jefferson County. The prosecution appears to have had an agenda which had little to do with law enforcement.


After a trial on corruption charges against White ended in a conviction, White moved to have the verdict set aside. His arguments were fairly technical. He had previously sought a change of venue on the grounds that he couldn’t get a fair trial in Birmingham because of the highly tendentious press coverage. Essentially, he was talking about the Birmingham News’s incendiary and unbalanced coverage of his case (of course, you won’t read a word about this or indeed any aspect of the case which is favorable to White in the Birmingham News). The judge moved the case to a different district, but White argued it should have been moved to a different division. A very fine point.


Nevertheless, the Northern District’s Chief Judge, U.W. Clemon, granted the motion and is referring the matter for a new trial.


I discovered that in addition to the entirely technical motion reported in the News, the defendant had also filed a motion to dismiss for selective prosecution, supported with an affidavit. And although the judge’s order dealt with the case on the technical prong, and noted that a mere affidavit was not enough to make out a case for selective prosecution, he was extremely troubled by what he read.

Here’s a passage from an affidavit submitted by Commissioner White’s wife Judy in support of the motion, which Judge Clemon quotes from extensively. On behalf of the Siegelman prosecution, federal agents


repeatedly and insistently told my husband that they ‘needed’ for [a particular] meeting [between Governor Siegelman and Richard Scrushy] to have occurred at the particular and specific date, and that they wanted him to testify that it did. My husband maintained that he could not do so, as he did not know when the meeting occurred. They even attempted to persuade him that the meeting ‘could have’ taken place on the date they stated, and reminded him that he had no calendar saying that it did not.


The whole of Mrs. White’s affidavit can be read here. Mrs. White is describing the cajoling of federal agents, including an individual named Long, who were working under the direction of Louis Franklin, the prosecutor of the Siegelman case. Franklin is the head of the criminal division for U.S. Attorney Leura Canary.


http://harpers.org/archive/2008/02/hbc-90002353