Is Another Bush Prosecution Falling Apart?

Bush-era prosecutions are falling apart in Alaska on an almost daily basis. But now we have a prosecution in the Deep South that appears to be imploding.

Does it involve Don Siegelman in Alabama or Paul Minor in Mississippi? No, but you are getting warm.

It's the case of former Georgia senate leader Charles Walker, who was convicted on a variety of corruption charges in 2005. The federal judge who oversaw the Walker prosecution now has acknowledged that he never should have been involved in the case because his impartiality might reasonably have been questioned.

Walker supporters are pushing for a new trial. But Scott Horton, legal-affairs contributor at Harper's, goes farther than that. He says Attorney General Eric Holder should intervene and dismiss the case.

Here is how Horton describes the environment around the Walker case:

In 1996, Charles Walker, a Georgia publisher and entrepreneur, became the first black American to be chosen as a Senate majority leader in the country. He achieved that in Georgia. And he quickly used his new position to advance some causes that were unpopular with whites in general and with the state’s Neoconfederate Republicans in particular. He pressed an initiative to drop the Confederate battle flag from the state flag of Georgia. Segregationists had adopted the Confederate banner as the state flag in 1956, as an act of defiance in the face of a growing civil rights movement. Walker’s effort succeeded, but it unleashed a tidal wave of resentment that Republicans rode to electoral success in Georgia. And it may have had personal consequences for Walker.

George W. Bush took charge in Washington in 2001, and new U.S. attorneys were appointed in Georgia. Walker suddenly discovered that he was the target of a no-holds-barred criminal investigation—an investigation launched in search of a crime. The U.S. attorney in question was the subject of a Justice Department investigation that found he opened criminal cases which appeared to advance the interests of a Republican candidate who happened to be his friend. The U.S. attorney in question was forced to resign his position, but did so after promising senior figures in the Georgia G.O.P. that the effort to get Walker would proceed just the same. And in fact it did. The case contained 142 counts, arguing that Walker engaged in fraud and corrupt dealings. The counts were for the most part an extreme stretch: at the heart of the government’s case was a claim that Walker defrauded advertisers in his publication by overstating its subscription base, a not exactly earth-shattering practice. But highly abusive practices identified by the Department’s own internal probe—reiterating corruption claims and widely fanning them in the press—drove the case to a dubious conviction.

And what about the trial judge?

The trial judge in the case was Dudley Bowen, who had close ties to the Augusta newspaper that was Walker’s principal competitor. Bowen turned out to be a perfect judge–from the prosecution’s perspective. He ruled against Walker on each of his 25 pre-trial motions, and directed that the jury be drawn from an overwhelmingly white pool.

Even in upholding Walker’s conviction, the Eleventh Circuit went out of its way to say it was “disturbed” by the district court’s handling of the case.

Will Judge Mark Fuller and Judge Henry Wingate soon be confessing that they had no business overseeing the Siegelman and Minor cases, respectively?

Let's not hold our collective breath. But the Walker case might offer a glimmer of hope that justice is slowly making its way south.