LITTLE ROCK – A federal judge says he will rule within the next few weeks on whether prosecutors properly applied the law when accusing a former Arkansas circuit judge of bribery.
Federal prosecutors and an attorney for former Circuit Judge Mike Maggio argued about the federal bribery statute during a hearing Friday to address the judge’s motion made earlier this month to withdraw his guilty plea. Chief U.S. District Judge Brian S. Miller said Friday he thought Maggio had gotten “cold feet,” but asked the attorneys to specifically address whether the statute cited in accusing Maggio was properly applied.
“If I deny the motion, we will set it for sentencing very soon after. If I grant it, then we’ll see where we go,” Miller said. “If he can be charged under this statute, I’m denying. If after reading through the cases… if I come to a firm conviction that this statute just flat out does not apply to him, then I go the other way. It’s going to be the law.”
Maggio was accused of accepting a $50,000 in campaign donations including at least $24,000 from a nursing home owner two days before reducing a jury’s $5.2 million award against the donor’s company in a civil lawsuit to $1 million.
Maggio admitted as part of his guilty plea in January 2015 that he had accepted the campaign donations from an unnamed nursing home owner and lobbyist in exchange for reducing the jury award.
That civil case centered on a patient who died at a nursing home because of what the family cited as staff neglect. Several family members from that case were at the federal court hearing Friday.
James Hensley, Maggio’s attorney, said the law requires that the alleged bribe be related to government business. He said the jury award in the civil case could not be construed as government business, and Maggio never had control of or touched federal money that may have been received by the court.
In his motion to withdraw and in court Friday, Hensley cited a Mississippi case where two judges were charged for bribes they allegedly accepted from attorneys. An appeals court ruled the law did not apply to the judges because they were charged as agents of that state’s administrative office of the courts, but the bribes were not related to the functions of that office.
Prosecutors said Hensley and Maggio had misapplied the ruling in that case.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Julie Peters cited rulings from a handful of other federal appeals courts and the U.S. Supreme Court where judges had found there did not need to be a strict connection between an alleged bribe and government business. She said several rulings mentioned the compelling federal interest in maintaining the integrity of agencies that receive federal funding.
They wrote in their response to the withdrawal motion that Maggio was acting to avoid sentencing because he had violated his plea agreement by failing to truthfully disclose all information and knowledge about the actions of other involved in the alleged bribery, including failing a lie detector test. They also said he failed to be available for interview with prosecutors and he stopped cooperating with them, as required under the agreement.
If sentencing proceeds, Maggio faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
(Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)
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