(Wash. Post on Don Siegelman) When is a campaign contribution a bribe?
Former Alabama governor Don Siegelman heads back to prison next month, contrite about and embarrassed by his bribery conviction. But when he faced resentencing earlier this month, he still was not quite ready to concede that he knowingly broke the law.
“If I had known I was coming close to the line where a campaign contribution becomes a bribe and a crime, I would have stopped,” Siegelman told U.S. District Judge Mark Fuller, who sentenced Siegelman to 61 / 2 years in prison.
Siegelman’s long and tangled legal journey — the charges date back to a 1999 state referendum — appears to be over.
But the debate over “the line where a campaign contribution becomes a bribe,” especially relevant in a year when campaign spending has become a paramount issue, shows no signs of fading away.
Not long before Siegelman learned his fate, a different federal judge who had presided over a different public corruption trial in the same Montgomery courthouse issued his own demarcation plea.
(...)
The Supreme Court’s guidance on the issue is thin. In 1991, it ruled that a campaign contribution could be a bribe if prosecutors proved a quid pro quo — that the contribution was “made in return for an explicit promise or undertaking by the official to perform or not to perform an official act.”
full: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-high-court-when-is-a-campaign-contribution-a-bribe/2012/08/12/68cdd94e-e2f9-11e1-a25e-15067bb31849_story.html
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