Gov. Don Siegelman is still in prison and the BFEE judge who put him there is still a crook.

[Octafish]

57. It's weird. There was no corruption in Siegelman's case.

Siegelman appointed Scrushy to the same hospital board he'd sat on for other Alabama administrations.

This time, though, there was a problem in the form of Karl Rove and his toady, Mark E. Fuller.

Siegelman Case Involved No "Meeting Of The Minds," But Scrushy Still Spent Six Years In Federal Prison

LegalSchnauzer, Thursday, April 18, 2013

A fundamental element of a federal-funds bribery case is that the defendants have a "meeting of the minds" on a "something for something" deal known as a quid pro quo.

Former HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy was released from federal prison last summer after serving six years for bribing former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman. But Scrushy said he didn't have a "meeting of the minds" with Siegelman on any of the issues that prosecutors claim constituted a crime. In fact, Scrushy says, he didn't meet with Siegelman at all. That's largely because he barely knew Siegelman, he did not support his election campaigns, and he did not support the education lottery that was central to the governor's term--and ultimately, the government's criminal case.

How on earth did Scrushy get convicted for bribing a governor he hardly knew, did not support, and did not meet with--over a seat on a health-care regulatory board that Scrushy says he did not want? That might go down as one of the great mysteries in the history of American criminal law. To make it more stunning, Scrushy says the government got it wrong about the person he met with and the amount of money involved.

That is one of many revelations from Scrushy's recent interview with San Francisco-based radio host Peter B. Collins. We already have reported that key testimony from former Siegelman aide Nick Bailey was deeply flawed, and prosecutors offered to let Scrushy out of the case in exchange for false testimony against Siegelman. Now we learn that central "facts" in the government's story were wildly off target. A podcast of the full interview can be heard here.

Perhaps most important is this: The government said Scrushy bribed Siegelman for a seat on the Alabama Certificate of Need Board (CON), but Scrushy said he did not even want to be on the board. How do you bribe someone for something you do not want? Here is Scrushy, from the Collins interview:

When Governor Siegelman was elected, he asked me to serve (on the CON board), and I said no. I had no interest in serving. I had resigned under the previous governor, Fob James; I did not complete my three-year term under Fob James. . . . I didn’t want to go to the meetings, and I was tired of it.

SNIP...

In the interview with Collins, Scrushy still seems to have a hard time believing he was prosecuted, much less convicted, for actions that did not come close to meeting the definition of a federal bribe. He points a finger for the whole charade squarely at Republican strategist Karl Rove, who apparently wanted to make sure that Siegelman, a Democrat, could not continue to win races in a GOP stronghold:

(Siegelman) and I never had a conversation about any of this. The transition chief sat down with me and said, "Richard, you need to help. Everybody else is helping. You run a large corporation, and you need to help get these businessmen off that note. . . . " I felt a corporate duty for me to help too, but the question is, "Why weren't these other people [who helped] indicted . . . ?" It was politically convenient for them to pull me into this because of what I had been through at HealthSouth. . . .

Siegelman was going to win the governorship again, and Karl Rove didn’t want that to happen. (The governor and I) never had a conversation about, "Richard would you help me do this or that?" It just didn’t happen.

CONTINUED...

http://legalschnauzer.blogspot.com/2013/04/siegelman-case-involved-no-meeting-of.html

Scrushy spent six years in prison for doing nothing wrong. Oh, Obama DOJ asked Fuller to tack on 20 years to Siegelman's sentence.

Anybody else tired of waiting for Change, let alone Justice?