CREW: SENATE SHOULD ADOPT "EFFECTIVE CORRUPTION PROSECUTIONS ACT OF 2007" AS PART OF SENATE ETHICS BILL

11 Jan 2007 // Washington, DC -- Yesterday, Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Mark Pryor (D-AR) introduced “The Effective Corruption Prosecutions Act of 2007" as an amendment to the pending ethics reform legislation. This bill extends the statute of limitations for serious public corruption offenses, such as bribery and honest services fraud, facilitates federal investigation of state and local corruption, and authorizes $25 million in additional federal funds for the Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute public corruption.

Melanie Sloan, CREW’s executive director, said today, “Public corruption eats at the very core of our democratic system of government. The legislation introduced by Sens. Leahy and Pryor will allow the Department of Justice to more effectively investigate and prosecute these serious crimes. CREW hopes to see the provision adopted as part of the final Senate ethics bill.”

A summary of the provision follows:

THE EFFECTIVE CORRUPTION PROSECUTIONS ACT OF 2007

This proposed legislation takes several simple steps to give investigators and prosecutors the tools they need to detect and prosecute corruption by public officials.

This legislation extends the statute of limitations for the most serious public corruption offenses.

• Specifically, it extends the statute of limitations from five years to eight years for bribery, deprivation of honest services, and extortion by a public official.

• Public corruption cases are among the most difficult and time-consuming cases to investigate and prosecute. They often require use of informants and electronic monitoring, as well as review of extensive financial and electronic records, techniques which take time to develop and implement.

• Bank fraud, arson, passport fraud, and various other offenses have 10-year statutes of limitations. Given the importance of enforcing public corruption offenses and the difficulty of making corruption cases, a more modest extended statute of limitations for these offenses makes sense too.

This amendment facilitates the investigation and prosecution of federal program bribery.

• 18 U.S.C. § 666, federal program bribery, is an important and regularly used statute – the key federal statute for prosecuting bribery involving state and local officials or officials of organizations that receive substantial federal grants.

• Wiretaps, when appropriately requested and authorized, are an important method for agents and prosecutors to gain evidence of corrupt activities. The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute is another important tool which helps prosecutors target organized crime and corruption.

• Agents and prosecutors may currently request authority to conduct wiretaps to investigate many serious offenses, including bribery of federal officials and even sports bribery, and may predicate RICO charges on these offenses as well. It is only reasonable that these important tools also be available for investigating the similar and equally important offense of federal program bribery.

This legislation authorizes funds for additional personnel to investigate and prosecute public corruption offenses.

• The FBI in recent years has diverted resources away from criminal law priorities, including corruption, into counterterrorism. The FBI may need to divert further resources to cover the growing costs of Sentinel, their data management system. The Department of Justice has similarly diverted resources, particularly from United States Attorney’s Offices.

• Additional funding is important to compensate for this diversion of resources and ensure that corruption offenses are aggressively pursued.

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Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) is a non-profit legal watchdog group dedicated to holding public officials accountable for their actions.

For more information, please visit www.citizensforethics.org or contact Naomi Seligman Steiner at 202.408.5565/press@citizensforethics.org.