Feds’ weak swing in Jones bribery trial part of a troubling trend

As you likely know by now, a federal jury deadlocked last week on all three corruption charges against Sen. Emil Jones III, D-Chicago. U.S. District Judge Andrea Wood declared a mistrial after polling individual jurors and arriving at the conclusion that they could not possibly reach a verdict.

When you think of the Chicago U.S. attorney’s legendary Public Corruption and Organized Crime Unit, the thing that immediately comes to mind is its hugely successful conviction rate — mid-to-high 90 percentile.

But the unit has run into some serious trouble lately.

In the last seven months, the U.S. attorney’s office has prosecuted 37 public corruption charges against four defendants — former AT&T President Paul La Schiazza, accused of bribing former House Speaker Michael Madigan; Madigan himself; Madigan’s top adviser Mike McClain and Jones.

The juries in those trials voted to acquit on seven charges (all Madigan) and deadlocked on another 20 charges.

Just 10 of those 37 charges have so far resulted in guilty verdicts (all Madigan), for a paltry 27% initial conviction rate — or 25% if you're only counting the number of defendants.

Some of these charges could be prosecuted again, of course, and La Schiazza is scheduled for a retrial in early June. But an initial 27% conviction rate demands some serious introspection from the FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office. They obviously need to build better cases and then more competently prosecute them.

Like the La Schiazza case, the charges against Jones seemed to be too much of a stretch. The federal government’s mole, red-light camera company SafeSpeed’s co-founder Omar Maani, pushed Jones to come up with a dollar amount to contribute ahead of the senator’s campaign fundraiser. After Jones finally told Maani, "you can raise me five grand" and then asked for a job for his former intern, the mole turned the conversation to Jones’ legislative proposal.

A month later, Jones tried telling Maani that he didn’t necessarily have to cover $5,000 worth of expenses for a job fair — the workaround the FBI’s mole had asked the senator to come up with — but Maani cut him off before Jones could finish his sentence.

More importantly, the money never changed hands, and Jones never amended the bill that Maani was so concerned with. I could easily see why the jury would be divided.

The whole thing has also felt sloppy and slipshod ever since the trial began.

Sometimes, the errors were small. One of the federal prosecutors didn’t seem to understand how Jones arrived in the Senate. The prosecutor, for example, believed Jones was appointed to replace his father, former Senate President Emil Jones, but the senator was actually named to the ballot when his dad dropped out of the race.

The prosecution’s star witness, its mole Maani, bragged to the jury that he had been bribing politicians since his 20s, and told the jury that he gave $23,000 cash to a suburban mayor via one of the most influential Democratic attorneys in Cook County (neither of them have ever been charged). The alleged cash giveaway was intended to show Maani’s "appreciation."

Maani was probably not the best witness, to say the least, particularly since prosecutors had no other real evidence indicating a pattern of corruption by Jones. The feds have never said why they chose to target Jones.

The overtly familiar, late-night phone texting evidence the feds introduced between Jones and his former male intern appeared, in my opinion, to try to out the senator as gay and seemed like a tactic from a dark, bygone era.

Even so, as Wood rightly reminded Jones at the end of the proceedings last week, he was not acquitted. His bond terms are still in place. The feds could come at him again in a new trial.

But before the U.S. attorney’s office makes its decision about whether to retry Jones or not, the top brass needs to figure out why they have had such a miserably low initial conviction rate lately.

I want as many public corruption convictions as possible. Lock them up if they truly deserve it. But confidence is undermined when the conviction rate falls so low.

Do better, please.

Rich Miller also publishes Capitol Fax, a daily political newsletter, and CapitolFax.com.

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