A federal appeals court does not need to delay former Faulkner County Circuit Judge Michael Maggio's bribery case even though the U.S. Supreme Court recently agreed to review a case involving a North Carolina veteran who, like Maggio, wants to take back a guilty plea, the U.S. attorney's office said in letter filed Thursday.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Julie Peters asked the clerk of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis to forward her letter to the court's three-judge panel that is to hear oral arguments in Maggio's appeal Wednesday.
Peters said the Rodney Class appeal "holds potential relevance to the Maggio case," but it "does not require a stay of the Maggio case."
Peters added: "The parties have briefed the underlying merits of the 'as applied' constitutional challenge -- whether a judge who accepts a bribe in exchange for a favorable ruling in a civil case can be convicted under [a federal bribery statute] as a matter of law -- in reference to Maggio's argument that the [U.S.] district court erred in denying Maggio's motion to withdraw his guilty plea on that basis."
[DOCUMENT: Read the U.S. attorney's letter]
Maggio's attorney, John Wesley Hall, said Thursday that it was too soon for him to comment on any response he might make to Peters' letter. Hall said he wasn't going to deal with it until the weekend.
On Feb. 21, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review another appeals court's decision in a case involving Class, a retired veteran and gun owner, against the United States.
"The question presented in the Class appeal is 'Whether a guilty plea inherently waives a defendant's right to challenge the constitutionality of his statute of conviction,'" Peters wrote.
According to scotusblog.com, Class had a permit to carry a concealed firearm in North Carolina, where he lives. "But when Class traveled to Washington and parked his car -- containing three guns -- in a parking lot near the U.S. Capitol, he was arrested and charged with violating a federal law prohibiting weapons on the Capitol grounds," the blog reported.
"Class pleaded guilty and then tried to argue on appeal that the law was unconstitutional," the blog added. "The government countered that the plea agreement ... waived Class's right to appeal, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agreed."
The blog said the case likely will be argued at the U.S. Supreme Court in the fall with a decision expected by the summer of 2018.
Maggio's case has been lingering since January 2015 when he pleaded guilty to a federal bribery charge. By the time he was scheduled for sentencing more than a year later, he had decided he wanted to withdraw the plea. But ruling in Little Rock, U.S. District Judge Brian Miller rejected Maggio's request and sentenced Maggio to 10 years in prison. Maggio is free pending his appeal.
In a 2015 plea agreement, Maggio admitted that he had lowered a Faulkner County Circuit Court jury's $5.2 million judgment to $1 million in July 2013 in exchange for contributions to his since-halted campaign for the Arkansas Court of Appeals. The decision came in a negligence lawsuit filed by the family of Martha Bull, a Perryville woman who died in 2008 in a Greenbrier nursing home owned by Michael Morton of Fort Smith.
Bull's family has since sued Morton and former state Sen. Gilbert Baker, a Republican lobbyist and fundraiser, and accused them of conspiring to funnel contributions to Maggio's campaign to get the judgment lowered. That case remains pending.
Neither Baker nor Morton is charged with a crime, and both deny wrongdoing.
Maggio was a judge in the 20th Judicial Circuit -- which covers Faulkner, Van Buren and Searcy counties -- when the negligence lawsuit went before him.
In September 2014, the Arkansas Supreme Court ordered Maggio removed from office because of unrelated issues, including comments he made online about divorce, bestiality, race and a legally confidential adoption case involving actress Charlize Theron.
State Desk on 03/03/2017