Legal Matters

• Scooter Jensen seems to be a little closer to jail today. The Wisconsin Assemblyman's friend and former colleague Steve Foti may be going state's evidence:

  Sources knowledgeable about the deal said Thursday that prosecutors would drop a felony corruption charge, and Foti, an Oconomowoc Republican, would serve 30 days in jail, followed by two years of probation. [. . .]
  
  Jensen, a former Assembly speaker, is scheduled to go on trial Feb. 21 on three felony charges and one misdemeanor accusing him of having aides campaign on state time.
  
  Foti's attorney previously had said that earlier discussions of a plea deal fell apart because prosecutors insisted that Foti would have to testify against Jensen. It wasn't clear Thursday what prompted Foti to change his mind and accept a deal that included possibly testifying against Jensen.

  Bonnie Ladwig, the other former Republican charged in the scandal, has also pleaded guilty. One former Assembly aide, who'd worked for Foti, is scheduled to go on trial with Scooter next month.
  
  
• The tire-slashing case is still meriting front-page (of the Metro section) stories, plus CourtTV's coverage. So far, there's a whole lot of circumstantial evidence, but some of it may be contradictory:

  Defense attorneys contend that the out-of-state political professionals might be responsible for damaging the vehicles on several possible fronts, including: whipping up the state's political fervor beyond normal levels, possibly carrying out the tire-slashings themselves and concocting circumstantial evidence to cast suspicion on the local men.
  
  That third theory came up repeatedly Thursday as defense attorneys questioned how Smith and Ward, as Simmons did on Wednesday, suddenly testified about seeing mud--the damaged vehicles were parked in a rain-soaked dirt lot--on the shoes of the five defendants when they returned to Democratic headquarters from a late-night excursion. None of the witnesses' earlier accounts included that detail.
  
  "When I heard the (prosecutor's) opening statement, I thought, 'Oh, we got a little mud in witness prep,' because there wasn't any in the discovery evidence," Robin Shellow, Omokunde's attorney, said in court after the jury had gone home.

  This is not, of course, exculpatory for the defendants, but it does damage the credibility of the witnesses, whose testimony is the crux of the prosecution's case. Someone, somewhere, is responsible for doing it, and they need to be caught, tried, and punished appropriately. Personally, I'd like to throw the Kerry national folks into the stocks just for this:

  Both [Alicia] Smith, an employee at Norfolk State University in Virginia, and {Myesha] Ward, a Maryland lawyer, admitted on the witness stand that they had been involved in their own campaign shenanigans during the early hours of Nov. 2, 2004. They testified that they had gone out with a third campaigner to pull the opposition's yard signs.
  
  "We replaced Bush signs with Kerry signs," Smith said, " . . . probably about six total."

  That's dirty campaigning, bad karma, and the kind of thing I expect from the other side, not our guys.