Editorials

On Oct. 12, 1999, Alabama voters went to the polls to decide the fate of a statewide lottery. Bob Riley, then a congressman representing Alabama’s 3rd District, wrote in the days before the vote, “Seldom in the course of Alabama’s election process has there ever been a single vote of such great importance as the one being cast on Tuesday.” Riley, now in his second term as governor, was more right than even he could have imagined.

By the evening of Oct. 12, the polling results were in. A majority of voters, claiming the moral high ground, rejected the lottery. That piety clearly doesn’t apply to all Alabamians; according to a 2005 Anniston Star review, sales of lottery tickets in Florida, Tennessee and Georgia are robust in the areas of those states that border Alabama. Since 1999, there’s been no serious effort to establish an Alabama lottery.

The deeper results of the election — as numerous as those thousands of Alabamians who cross the state line to play the lottery — are still coming in, almost eight years later.

Thursday’s sentencing of Don Siegelman and Richard Scrushy is the latest chapter in a long-running saga. Both will serve about seven years behind bars.

Siegelman, a Democrat whose election as governor in 1998 was built around creating a state lottery, was convicted of accepting a bribe. The money — $500,000 from Scrushy — was used to fund a pro-lottery election campaign.

Back in 1999, the pro-lottery forces weren’t the only ones with funny money in their bank accounts.

A Mississippi casino, worried over how a lottery next door might cut into its business, was secretly funding anti-lottery forces with the help of Republican lobbyists Jack Abramoff and Ralph Reed. Gambling money was laundered through conservative outlets and then funneled to the Alabama Christian Coalition, something that wasn’t fully known until 2004.

Clandestine and deceptive shifting of money from tribal interests in Mississippi? Seems that might be interesting to the federal prosecutors who have doggedly pursued Siegelman for four years.

Not so. While the reputations of those involved in this scheme are damaged, none have faced prosecution or even investigation over their actions during the 1999 campaign.

That’s not the case for Siegelman, who has been under the focus of one investigation or another practically since he won the governorship in 1998 with 57 percent of the vote. Results like that worry Republicans, and not just the ones in Alabama. If a Democrat like Siegelman could handily win a statewide election for governor, then he might have someday challenged one of Alabama’s U.S. senators, both of whom are reliable Republican votes in a closely divided Senate.

Tarnishing political foes is a job for politicians, not for partisan prosecutors. The pursuit of Siegelman by the offices of Bush-appointed U.S. attorneys, aggressive as it might be, cannot be dismissed as pure politics.

Siegelman and Scrushy might be guilty, as a jury found them. However, evidence is growing that the partisan politics that has infected the Justice Department during President Bush’s time in office might play a role here. According to one survey examining the prosecution of politicians during the Bush years, seven Democrats have been charged by the feds for every Republican prosecuted.

Add to that the firings of U.S. attorneys who declined GOP demands to pursue bogus charges against Democrats.

Add to that the close relationship with Karl Rove to the nastier side of Alabama politics.

Add to that accusations from a north Alabama Republican lawyer, who claims a big-time Republican player in the state hinted in 2002 that Siegelman would be taken care of by federal prosecutors.

Add to that the non-pursuit of campaign cash money-launderers on the other side of the 1999 lottery vote.

Putting all this together doesn’t clear Siegelman or Scrushy. It does raise questions, tons of them.

Rep. Artur Davis, D-Birmingham, ought to follow the advice of a former Arizona attorney general.

Grant Woods, a Republican, told the Los Angeles Times, “From start to finish, this case has been riddled with irregularities. It does not pass the smell test.” His counsel: “Congressional committees ought to investigate what in the world went on in this case.”

This page agrees, and so does the concept of equal justice under the law.