Isn’t that nice? The Siegelman prosecutors have decided maybe it isn’t so important to jail Don Siegelman for 30 years after all.
Federal prosecutors are no longer seeking stiffer prison sentences for former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman and former HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy.
Prosecutors filed a motion this week with the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals asking that their appeals of the sentences be dropped. Their appeal had called for a longer prison term than Siegelman’s more than seven-year sentence and Scrushy’s almost seven-year sentence.
The latest filing does not say why prosecutors want to drop their appeal.
I can’t imagine why, when everyone in the country is close to concluding that the entire prosecution was a big political witch hunt, they don’t want to go argue for more prison time for Siegelman. Can you?
Perhaps this means we’ll see prosecutors making a motion in a few weeks saying, "golly, maybe we didn’t really want to prosecute Siegelman after all."