As has been posted, this morning in open court, Richard Scruggs and Sid Backstrom pled guilty to conspiracy to bribe a state court judge. This was a remarkable and sad event. And then the server blew up as I tried to post. Here’s at summary level what occurred:
- Richard Scruggs is pleading to conspiracy to bribe a state court judge, count 1 of the indictment, with other counts to be dismissed. This was an open plea, that is, no recommended sentence.
- The government expects that he will get the full five year sentence on that count.
- Scruggs is still in jeopardy from the investigation into whether the judge was bribed in Wilson v. Scruggs. Prosecutor Tom Dawson said: "I want to make it painfully clear as to the investigation with respect to the Wilson case: This has no effect on a subsequent investigation as to that case. " Reading between the lines, I would take it to mean that the Scruggs plea only resolves his exposure on the Lackey bribe issue. That is remarkable.
- There was no mention of cooperation by Scruggs.
- Sid Backstrom also pled guilty to count 1, with other charges dropped.
- Sid Backstrom is agreeing to cooperate. What that means was not explained, although I would think this means he will be a witness against Zach Scruggs.
- The government does not think Backstrom is the subject of any other investigation, although they did not agree to anything about that.
- Zach Scruggs’s case is not resolved. It is still set for trial at the end of the month, 200 potential jurors have been summonsed, and Judge Biggers seems determined to keep that date.
- Zach Scruggs’s lawyers are going to file some motions relating to how this changes the case, unless they can work out the changes with the government. This relates to the 404(b) evidence –they are obviously going to argue that the other crime evidence was aimed at Richard Scruggs and not Zach and that it should not come in. I’ll make no prediction about that.
- There was an interesting and unusual disagreement with the government’s statement of facts in the plea colloquy. The government stated in its facts for both Backstrom and Scruggs that a conspiracy began in March to corruptly influence the state court judge, and Scruggs spoke to say that he had agreed to earwig the judge but not corruptly influence him in March, and that he later agreed to join a conspiracy to corruptly influence the judge. Sid Backstrom took a similar stance. The judge then broke down the elements of the offense for Backstrom and took the plea.
I find it most remarkable that this left so many open issues. The government surrendered neither its case against Zach nor other criminal investigations against Dickie Scruggs to get a guilty plea. More about this later.
NMC
Yo, everybody, we’re here at the ol’ homeplace.
What do you think?
Congrats lotus on the greatest testament any reader community could ever bestow upon your work. Page views is a meaningless measure. Crashing your server means you are loved, admired and respected as a ‘Go To’ source.
My best regards for your continued success.
Bud Fox
Okay, y’all, you don’t have to sign in TO comment here now, so please remember to sign THE comment, or nobody’ll know who’s talking.
(Sorry, you’re gonna have to do without an edit-button until we get home too.)
Yay, BUD — you just proved me wrong!
((((HUG))))
The poor server guy thought this was WWIII hitting him or something. He’ll let us back on tomorrow at noon, riddenword just told me, but he’s gonna watch us like the famous hawk.
Think we may need us a new longterm-solution here, huh?
Lotus, Bud is right. Anybody can make a hit counter roll like crazy – it takes a lot (and says a lot) when your server provider thinks they’re getting a denial of service attack!
When the tsunami has all the characteristics of a DDOS but is actually your readers knocking on the door wanting fresh bread … that dear lotus is HUGE.
These are the seminal moments that historically have elevated shops like yours to new plateaus within the blogosphere and new media.
Please strike while the fires are raging. Too many customers is never a problem.
(Sorry, you’re gonna have to do without an edit-button until we get home too.) – a most fabulous invention that.
Just wanted to give you kudos, didn’t feel right that Folo went out during all of this.
Thanks “FOLO”.
The server farm owner normally is a pretty unflappable guy who has clients with massive bandwidth usage spread over multiple servers, but he was sputtering and panicking over the spike today.
folo.us is one of only three sites on a large dedicated server, but he made it sound like smoke was pouring out of the box on the rack – all processes were maxed out, RAM usage was at the limit, and the paired 120GB harddrives were spinning off the rails.
Worse, a dozen or so separate servers were connected through the same internet switch and they all were slowing down because of all the bandwidth folo’s servers were sucking up.
The internet is being told that folo.us lives here at wordpress.com for the forseeable future. I’ll try to put a donation button back up on this site because Lotus is going to need some help if she is going to try to accommodate this level of interest at a for-pay server.
For now, we’ll see how wordpress.com (which offers free hosting) deals with the traffic.
Congratulations on this milestone, Lotus. Just when the pleas started coming in, I had to go to a seminar in a room full of defense lawyers. Not one of them knew anything about the Scruggsmania, so I gave them the web address. Hopefully, they’ll get the message and re-route.
Congratulations on a great site. I have found your comments at times on point, at times hilarious. I did want this to work out for the Scruggs family and hope it is coming to a close. Thank you for you wonderful coverage.
How come the CL is reporting that Zach got the deferred prosecution deal, and that is not reflected from courtroom reports and pacer records?
Some of the
feeding frenzycoverage:NYT
LAT
Conde Nast
CBS
AP
ABA Journal (h/t DeltaNative)
Clarion-Ledger
DJournal
Thank you and welcome, karen s at 2:13PM!
<<slidin’ in all out of breath trying hard to catch up. I take the day off to work in a flower bed, no phone or pager with me and I find out the world has flipped upside down. MsRazor’s flower bed will have to wait…and probably dinner as well.
Thank goodness you two are on the job Lotus and NMC…..
it isn’t based on anything that happened in court, greg, and I’m not sure what it’s based upon.
Glad you made your way back in da house, Razor!
NMC–will the government go after his assets are did I miss the Langston-type “gets to keep his stuff” section?
delete “are” and insert “or”…I’ve gotta adapt to the “no edit” version of Folo again.
That shot of Sid in the C-L: someone walking into his own funeral.