Justice delayed, again

First one of my familiar disclaimers: I'm neither a lawyer nor an authority on the proceedings of federal jurisprudence.

Yet I am blessed with a modicum of common sense and a lifelong observer of the systems we rely upon for integrity in justice.

That said, you also can count me among the bamfoozled of Arkansas as to why it's taking over a year for disgraced and ousted Circuit Judge Michael Maggio to be sentenced after pleading guilty on Jan. 9, 2015, to accepting campaign contributions to reduce a jury's award to a plaintiff in his court.

A month or two's delay, perhaps three, I can understand. But more than 12 months to come up with a sentence following the man's negotiated guilty plea leaves me shaking my head. Really, over a year?

The 54-year-old former judge who was removed from the bench and lost his license to practice stands to face up to 10 years in prison, three years of supervised release and a fine up to $250,000, reporter Debra Hale-Shelton wrote the other day. She also reported that negotiated pleas often result in lesser sentences in exchange for a defendant's cooperation and information about others.

I wonder today, as Maggio reflects, if he feels the money was worth blowing up his career, reputation and life.

The inexplicable delay has happened without a single motion listed on the online public record. The news account says there's been no reason offered for it thus far. Suppose the U.S. Attorney's Office forgot about Maggio? Might he somehow have slipped between a wide seam in bureaucratic red tape? I doubt it. Speculation has it that prosecutors may be waiting for other circumstances to fully unfold (as part of the plea bargain) and await Maggio's possible testimony in their ongoing investigation.

His sentencing was initially to be done on July 24 but was postponed until Nov. 20. It then was moved to Feb. 26, nearly 14 months after his guilty plea.

Hale-Shelton also wrote that Assistant U.S. Attorney Pat Harris declined comment Friday when asked about the extreme delay. Lauren White Hoover, Maggio's attorney, also didn't care to comment.

Veteran defense attorney John Wesley Hall of Little Rock, a man whose brain I often picked in legal matters while reporting during the 1970s and '80s, is very familiar with the workings of federal courtrooms. He told Hale-Shelton that, while long delays in sentencing occur in other states' federal courtrooms, he considers it rare in our state for a sentencing to stretch even past seven months.

Readers may recall headlines Maggio has made since 2014. They stemmed from the 2008 case of Martha Bull of Perryville who died in the Greenbrier Nursing and Rehabilitation Center owned by Michael Morton. That led to a successful negligence suit filed by Bull's family against Morton's home. A Faulkner County jury, obviously moved by grim details of the woman's death, awarded the family a $5.2 million judgment.

But Maggio admitted in a later plea agreement with the U.S. Attorney and the Justice Department that he'd reduced the jury's award to $1 million in exchange for thousands of dollars in contributions made to his campaign to become a state Court of Appeals judge.

Hale-Shelton reported that Maggio's plea agreement did not name names (at least for public consumption), but implicated two others, those being a lobbyist and fundraiser, and the owner of the Greenbrier nursing home where Bull's death prompted that negligence lawsuit.

Then came another civil lawsuit filed by the Bull family, which remains pending in Faulkner County Circuit Court at Conway. That action names Morton and Republican lobbyist and former state Sen. Gilbert Baker of Conway; Baker helped raise money for Maggio's 2014 campaign. Morton and Baker are accused in the suit of funneling money to the campaign to get Maggio's reduced judgment.

Both men have denied wrongdoing; neither has been charged with a crime.

Hale-Shelton reported that a federal investigation is continuing, and none of the attorneys involved in that case responded last week to her questions. In other words, an air of silence not unlike crickets softly chirping in the woods on a mid-July evening has enveloped the circumstances of Maggio's delayed sentencing.

However, there might finally be a lightning bug flashing in the dark forest. Judge Brian Miller is set to oversee Maggio's sentencing come Feb. 26--well, unless of course that, too, is postponed.

One thing makes me happy in this down-home mystery. At least Maggio isn't serving on our state's Court of Appeals.

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Mike Masterson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at mmasterson@arkansasonline.com.

Editorial on 01/30/2016

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