Afternoon Troy: Legal Shenanigans

I read an interesting story yesterday in the Mobile Register written by George Talbot. On top of rightly calling this "the most important race that nobody's talking about," he discussed, among other things, a movement afoot to push Troy King to reimburse the public for paying his legal defense bills. This really seems to be a rather simple concept--you tarnish your office and jeopardize your own professional reputation, and you pay your really, really expensive legal bill when it comes to you. That's certainly true in the real world.

Unfortunately, it's not true in Troy's world. In Troy's world, your cronies in the legislature support an even larger bailout for you and your legal team. The AP first covered the story here (http://blog.al.com/spotnews/2009/08/alabama_ag_troy_king_okd_to_sp.html), and it was then picked up by a number of different folks, including Libertarian Loretta Nall. It appears that, during the most recent Special Session of the legislature, AG King's office decided that $40,000 was just not enough--it needed to be raised to $100,000. Interesting, spokesman and chief of staff Chris Bence defended the move, since "many of the documents sought by the federal grand jury are legally sensitive." However, let's think about that for a moment. Are there really documents in AG King's office that are so "legally sensitive" his OWN professional staff can't be trusted to handle them? I find that hard to believe. As Skip Tucker pointed out in the Mobile Register column yesterday, even a third-year law student can answer a subpoena.

Of course, as is always true with Troy, this is just the tip of the iceberg. It turns out Troy has been farming out work to private trial lawyers for a while, including the state's Medicare Fraud cases. When Alabama opted to sue different medical companies for defrauding Alabama's Medicare system, King sought out a private firm--Hand Arendall of Mobile-- which then teamed with another, Beasley Allen of Montgomery. Beasley Allen, headed by liberal trial lawyer and Artur Davis campaign head Jere Beasley, released a press release noting that the firms were getting about 14% of all the winnings, plus expenses. That means, at the very least, these attorneys stand to get more than $17 million and will likely get more as the final cases are resolved.

Turns out this is a pretty lucrative deal for private attorneys, and they become willing to fight for business at the state trough. Other states have tried this, and they have had their share of problems. Over in Georgia, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published a disturbing story on June 21 about Georgia's Democratic AG, Thurbert Baker and noted that he had awarded over $173 million in contracts in the last five years, and many of these contracts had gone to firms which had contributed to his campaign. I did a little more research, and I found out that this process of hiring trial lawyers to handle state business is pretty common for liberals. It was really started by ultra-liberal NY AG Eliot Spitzer (remember, they guy who became governor and was caught in bed with "hired help" in Washington?) and it has been used by some in other states.

What do conservatives think? Well, Judge Bill Pryor told a writer for the conservative Federalist Society in early 2008: "These contracts...create the potential for outrageous windfalls or even outright corruption for political supporters of the office who negotiated the contracts."

So, it seems like Troy King has bigger problems than just paying for his legal defense. He certainly owes the taxpayers some money, but he also owes them an explanation on why he is awarding these contracts in the dark, without a fair and open public process. As long as I can remember, conservatives and trial lawyers haven't really been on the same side. It's nothing personal--they just stand for vastly different principles. To see Troy standing so close is not only disgusting and unethical, it really begs questions of his conservatism.