Something about today's subject matter caused me to do a little research into black areas and gray areas.
I came across a word, "anthracite," and this description: "Pure anthracite is black. It may appear slightly gray if there are impurities present."
So the word does not apply precisely. I'm actually talking about the reverse of anthracite. Can something gray turn slightly black by the addition of impurity? Is there such a thing as slightly black?
I'm talking about right, wrong and the law.
A disgraced former circuit judge in Conway named Mike Maggio stands convicted of taking a bribe that, as yet, no one is accused of extending.
He is appealing the conviction on the basis that he admitted to taking a bribe only as part of a leniency-for-cooperation deal on which federal prosecutors reneged when he told them merely the truth about others instead of what the federal prosecutors wanted to hear.
He now says there was no quid pro quo in a bevy of campaign contributions to his short-lived campaign for the state Court of Appeals from a nursing-home magnate, Michael Morton of Fort Smith. That array of payments was masterminded by a former state senator and lobbyist named Gilbert Baker, also from there in Conway.
About the time of the multiple checks from Morton for Maggio, specifically routed to political action committees that Baker had set up or dispatched others to set up, Maggio reduced from $5.2 million to $1 million a jury award, in the death of an elderly woman, against a Greenbrier nursing home owned by Morton.
Judges sometimes reduce jury awards. Perhaps this one should have been reduced. But Maggio acknowledged that Baker made him aware as the matter was under his consideration that Morton was supporting his appeals court campaign financially.
The state canons of judicial ethics say Maggio was not supposed to know that.
There are at least three morals to the story, and one tricky question.
One moral would be not to take a bribe.
Another would be that, if you do not believe you took a bribe, then you should not sign documents put before you by federal prosecutors in which you say you took a bribe.
The third is that we desperately need to reform our politics, considering that regularity and criminality are not readily distinguishable.
That leads us to the burning question: Is it a crime if a friend and supporter who has become absolutely full of himself and out of control in pushing for tort reform to limit damages--here I mean Gilbert Baker--sets up a network of legal PACs and gets a nursing-home magnate to send him checks of legally permissible donations made out to those PACs, then mentions to you the magnate's political support of you in the general time frame during which, in your local judge role, you find it appropriate to reduce by $4.2 million the jury hit against one of the magnate's nursing homes?
By setting up the host of PACs, Baker could maneuver more money from Morton to Maggio than by simply asking Morton to make a direct and capped campaign contribution.
So is this stench--and it's at least that--an actual and direct trade? Only three people might know, and only one of those--the judge--knows for sure via his heart and mind. Well, Baker might also know in terms of his own intent.
Legal sources tell me the question has less to do with Morton, a businessman merely writing legal checks as directed by a political operator.
Baker, an energetic and likeable man, had left by the requirement of term limits a state Senate career he'd plainly taken to. He had been made a vice president for government relations by the University of Central Arkansas, a job from which he was essentially fired.
Meantime he was pursuing on the side his passion--which was to get tort reform and damage caps done both by constitutional amendment and the election of Republican judges.
Recent accounts in this newspaper have him changing the dates on checks prematurely made out to the campaign of state Supreme Court Associate Justice Rhonda Wood, also from there in the Republican judges' hotbed that is Conway. And they have him arranging as well for a political group to give a lawyer a bonus that the lawyer would then turn around and spend for contributions to a Baker-favored judgeship campaign.
So Baker was clearly running a bit amok.
Otherwise, though, we confront what basically are tragically pervasive questions of contemporary American politics. They are questions of odor and color and gradations resulting from the addition of impurities.
What is smelly, then stinky, then crooked? What is gray or black? And what of this reverse anthracite? How might it fit in the criminal code?
That's what we have federal grand juries for, I suppose.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 07/07/2016