Unforgivable: The Governor and the Teenager
BY EVAN OSNOS
Bob McDonnell, the disgraced ex-governor of Virginia, appealed for the mercy of the court, and he received it. A former Presidential prospect with a career in state politics, McDonnell, along with his wife, Maureen, was convicted in September of trading the powers of his office for loans, shopping sprees, golf trips, a Rolex, and use of a Ferrari and a country home—a pattern that unfolded in the course of eleven months, netting his family a range of pleasures worth a hundred and seventy-seven thousand dollars, until federal prosecutors took notice.
Federal sentencing guidelines called for ten to twelve years. Michael Dry, an assistant United States attorney who prosecuted the case, called the series of abuses “unprecedented in Virginia’s two-hundred-and-twenty-six-year history,” and sought six and a half years. McDonnell’s defense attorneys asked for no prison time. They proposed instead six thousand hours of community service and in court presented eleven witnesses, including another former governor and an N.F.L. star, who argued for leniency. The witnesses said that McDonnell cared little for material possessions; the Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates reported that the conviction itself would be a sufficient deterrent to others; the governor’s sister said her brother was already so grieved that he had trouble eating and was losing weight. While pleading for the judge’s grace, even McDonnell’s lawyer choked up.
By the time the U.S. district judge James Spencer rendered his sentence, he sounded almost as pained. “It breaks my heart, but I have a duty I can’t avoid,” Spencer said. In a lengthy preamble, he compared himself to the Roman prefect who reluctantly condemned Jesus Christ. “Unlike Pontius Pilate, I can’t wash my hands of it all,” Spencer said. “A meaningful sentence must be imposed.”
He sentenced McDonnell to two years, a term of such impressive leniency that McDonnell’s first words outside the courthouse in Richmond were ones of thanks to the justice system. Dry, the prosecutor, left the court without comment, “his face twisted in anger,” as a reporter put it. For comparison purposes, prosecutors had argued that McDonnell’s deeds went on far longer than those of Phillip A. Hamilton, a former Virginia lawmaker convicted, in 2011, of bribery and extortion and sentenced to nine and a half years, and that McDonnell’s office was higher than that of Hamilton. (Another former governor, Rod Blagojevich, of Illinois, is serving fourteen years.)
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become epidemic.
