At least there is a little good news today: Georgia Thompson, apparent victim of a Republican political scheme, has been freed. From the NYT:
Opponents of Gov. Jim Doyle of Wisconsin spent $4 million on ads last year trying to link the Democratic incumbent to a state employee who was sent to jail on corruption charges. The effort failed, and Mr. Doyle was re-elected : and now the state employee has been found to have been wrongly convicted. The entire affair is raising serious questions about why a United States attorney put an innocent woman in jail.
The conviction of Georgia Thompson has become part of the furor over the firing of eight United States attorneys in what seems like a political purge. While the main focus of that scandal is on why the attorneys were fired, the Thompson case raises questions about why other prosecutors kept their jobs.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, which heard Ms. Thompson’s case this month, did not discuss whether her prosecution was political : but it did make clear that it was wrong. And in an extraordinary move, it ordered her released immediately, without waiting to write a decision.”Your evidence is beyond thin,”Judge Diane Wood told the prosecutor.”I’m not sure what your actual theory in this case is.”
Members of Congress should ask whether it was by coincidence or design that Steven Biskupic, the United States attorney in Milwaukee, turned a flimsy case into a campaign issue that nearly helped Republicans win a pivotal governor’s race.
There was good reason for the appeals court to be shocked. Ms. Thompson, a 56-year-old single woman, seems to have lost her home and spent four months in prison simply for doing her job. Ms. Thompson, who spent years in the travel industry before becoming a state employee, was responsible for putting the state’s travel account up for competitive bid. Mr. Biskupic claimed that she awarded the contract to an agency called Adelman Travel because its C.E.O. contributed to Mr. Doyle’s campaign.
To charge her, Mr. Biskupic had to look past a mountain of evidence of innocence. Ms. Thompson was not a Doyle partisan. She was a civil servant, hired by a Republican governor, with no identifiable interest in politics. She was only one member of a seven-person committee that evaluated the bidders. She was not even aware of the Adelman campaign contributions. She also had a good explanation for her choice: of the 10 travel agencies that competed, Adelman submitted the lowest-cost bid.
While Ms. Thompson did her job conscientiously, that is less clear of Mr. Biskupic. The decision to award the contract : the supposed crime : occurred in Madison, in the jurisdiction of Wisconsin’s other United States attorney. But for reasons that are hard to understand, the Milwaukee-based Mr. Biskupic swept in and took the case.
While he was investigating, in the fall of 2005, Mr. Biskupic informed the media. Justice Department guidelines say federal prosecutors can publicly discuss investigations before an indictment only under extraordinary circumstances. This case hardly met that test.
The prosecution proceeded on a schedule that worked out perfectly for the Republican candidate for governor. Mr. Biskupic announced Ms. Thompson’s indictment in January 2006. She went to trial that summer, and was sentenced in late September, weeks before the election. Mr. Biskupic insisted in July, as he vowed to continue the investigation, that”the review is not going to be tied to the political calendar.”
But the Thompson case was”the No. 1 issue”in the governor’s race, says the Wisconsin Democratic Party chairman, Joe Wineke. In a barrage of commercials, Mr. Doyle’s opponents created an organizational chart that linked Ms. Thompson : misleadingly called a”Doyle aide”: to the governor. Ms. Thompson appeared in an unflattering picture, stamped”guilty,”and in another ad, her name was put on a graphic of jail-cell doors slamming shut. …
Read the entire article here. I don’t know exactly why Georgia Thompson was made the designated victim in this scheme, but the fact that she is single, female, middle aged and probably not terribly affluent must have factored into the decision to target her. She was effectively a political prisoner, and I hope that the people who did this to her get a chance to occupy the cell she vacated.
–Ann Bartow
With the revelation that Bush himself axed the New Mexico federal prosecutor at the urging of Sen. Domenici because he refused to prosecute voter fraud claims leveled by Republican activists, the story of the political abuse of the nation’s criminal justice system is now where it belongs, in the White House.
But locally, some rather obvious steps need to be taken to clean up the mess left behind by the bogus prosecution of Georgia Thompson.
For starters:
1) Halt all ongoing investigations coming out of the offices of the U.S. Attorney
Dan Biskupic; they are now badly tainted by the smell of political corruption.
2) Close down the grand jury that indicted Georgia Thompson; the thought
that this thoroughly discredited body would be used again to hear evidence from the still on-going investigations of Troha and voter fraud
nonsense defies belief.
3) Demand that the U.S Attorney Biscupic explain his practice of hiring staff
based on their membership in the secret Federalist Society.
4) Determine if Judge Randa requested that he be placed on reserve status.
If so this would open his seat for a new appointment by Bush/Rove. And
if Biscupic was aware of this plumb-and he certainly was-that, coupled with his understanding that Bush/Rove made hiring and firing decisions in the justice sytem based on fealty to their political agenda, would immediately call into question his motives for the numerous cruel and groundless prosecutions for voter fraud as well as the persecution and jailing of Georgia Thompson, notwithstanding the Democratic eyewash provided by
Lautenschlager and other skittish Dems.
5) Is Judge Randa himself a member of the secret Federalist Society.
6) Examine the transcript of the Georgia Thompson grand jury. Anybody can
request a copy of this document-call the clerk of courts for details( (414) 297-3372); if ever there was a need for the public to
know what went on in a grand jury, this is it. The need to protect on-going investigations doesn’t exist because they are already fully compromised.
This is one of those times when the ‘average citizen’ can demand justice and fair play.
And believe me, ‘they’ are listening with cocked ears.
Phil Ball
428 North Main St, Philville
Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin
53538
920-397-7249
pball9258@charter.net