Chicago Tribune Editorial - Do the crime, do the time

Chicago Tribune Editorial - Do the crime, do the time
Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune
Published July 3, 2007

The crimes were serious, the jurors unanimous, the sentencing judge plainly perturbed at the defendant's felonious behavior. And so, four weeks ago, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, got what he had coming: 30 months in a federal slammer.

On Monday, though, President Bush commuted Libby's prison sentence. That leaves Libby, 56, with a $250,000 fine, a lengthy probation and a public humiliation that, no matter how long he lives or what else he accomplishes, will define the first paragraph of his obituary.

But in nixing the prison term, Bush sent a terrible message to citizens and to government officials who are expected to serve the public with integrity. The way for a president to discourage the breaking of federal laws is by letting fairly rendered consequences play out, however uncomfortably for everyone involved. The message to a Scooter Libby ought to be the same as it is for other convicts: You do the crime, you do the time.

The bizarre and politically tinged case that produced Libby's wrongdoing shouldn't obscure the seriousness of his offenses. Most of us are blessedly in the process of forgetting the saga that erupted around one-time CIA operative Valerie Plame, whose name surfaced in the public prints in 2003. Who in official Washington had leaked her identity?

That case meandered far from its origins; no one was ever charged with the leak. But somewhere along that twisting path, Libby decided to break tenets of the legal system he had sworn to uphold. Jurors convicted him of two counts of perjury, one count of obstructing justice, and one count of making false statements about when and how he learned Plume's identity, as well as what he told Washington journalists about her.

U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald of Chicago, the special prosecutor who directed the Plame inquiry, has done a succinct job of explaining why those crimes so profoundly undermine our justice system: "When someone doesn't tell the truth to the system, everyone suffers. The legal system suffers because we don't know what the actual facts are. And, frankly, lots of other people suffer since, when you don't know what the truth is, people draw all sorts of conclusions."

True enough -- just as people will draw conclusions about a president who commutes the sentence of his vice president's right-hand man. As someone intricately involved in helping Cheney on national security issues, Libby served the interests of the same president who on Monday declared incarceration "excessive" punishment for "a first-time offender with years of exceptional public service."

That's the sort of unconvincing piety Illinois defense attorneys murmur after their clients are sentenced in public corruption cases here. It's a lame excuse in Chicago and, on Monday it was a lame excuse in Washington too.