-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- At 01:39 PM 7/21/97 -0400, Declan McCullagh wrote:
I just spoke with Peter Avenia, a Federal public defender representing Jim Bell. He said that Bell did indeed plead guilty last Friday to two felony counts and sentencing is set for October. Apparently at least the thrust of this "IRS Inspection" press release is accurate.
Avenia knew nothing about it, though.
-Declan
I'll be curious to see what kind of deal he got. It had better be an awfully good one (say "time served"). If not he was as dumb as toast. He had a perfect chance to rake the Feds over the coals and try nasty disfavored defenses like Selective Prosecution. Hard to win that one but he had as good a case as any one I've seen for that defense. At the most, he would have gotten a short sentence if convicted. Big deal. Since he was apparently not doing a great deal with his life in any case, he could have used it for some good. Make the Feds spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on him and tie up their resources. Prison is no punishment for those who like to read and write. In these political cases where the Feds are clearly overreaching, those who don't plead do much better than those who do. This is the reverse of the situation in normal criminal cases. Look at those in the Operation Sun Devil cases who plead vs. those who fought. Or the Princeton Partners brokers who fought Rudy during the '80s Wall Street crackdown and won vs. Michael Milken who plead and ended up with the same sentence he would have received if he had been convicted. Or even G. Gordon Liddy who refused to plead, was convicted and sentenced to a long sentence got pardoned (because of the disparity of his punishment) and is now more successful than all the rest of that crew put together. Don't plead in political cases. It's stupid. DCF -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP for Personal Privacy 5.0 Charset: noconv iQCVAwUBM9OvuIVO4r4sgSPhAQGVnQP+KBhUk6LX1kbDtLL1TUi6vOFseXCquRpO RS5p93NCPvXof5XWwyjy+MOqDVVp2LHGhlA5MehSHoskacrId1jTN5XPKzM4teoF l2GOLLMNZNcesQPltH88SNIa8WoPqcRG91UfFPHUwvLVt0AiKh9xzXnVU5wxrTrb Uh3ACgU1QPA= =vzKP -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----