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<DIV class=timestamp>April 16, 2007</DIV>
<DIV class=kicker><NYT_KICKER>Editorial Observer</NYT_KICKER></DIV>
<H1><NYT_HEADLINE type=" " version="1.0">A Woman Wrongly Convicted and a U.S.
Attorney Who Kept His Job </NYT_HEADLINE></H1><NYT_BYLINE type=" "
version="1.0"></NYT_BYLINE>
<DIV class=byline>By ADAM COHEN</DIV><NYT_TEXT></NYT_TEXT>
<DIV id=articleBody>
<P>Madison, Wis.</P>
<P>Opponents of Gov. Jim Doyle of Wisconsin spent $4 million on ads last year
trying to link the Democratic incumbent to a state employee who was sent to jail
on corruption charges. The effort failed, and Mr. Doyle was re-elected — and now
the state employee has been found to have been wrongly convicted. The entire
affair is raising serious questions about why a United States attorney put an
innocent woman in jail.</P>
<P>The conviction of Georgia Thompson has become part of the furor over the
firing of eight United States attorneys in what seems like a political purge.
While the main focus of that scandal is on why the attorneys were fired, the
Thompson case raises questions about why other prosecutors kept their jobs.</P>
<P>The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, which heard Ms.
Thompson’s case this month, did not discuss whether her prosecution was
political — but it did make clear that it was wrong. And in an extraordinary
move, it ordered her released immediately, without waiting to write a decision.
“Your evidence is beyond thin,” Judge Diane Wood told the prosecutor. “I’m not
sure what your actual theory in this case is.”</P>
<P>Members of Congress should ask whether it was by coincidence or design that
Steven Biskupic, the United States attorney in Milwaukee, turned a flimsy case
into a campaign issue that nearly helped Republicans win a pivotal governor’s
race. </P>
<P>There was good reason for the appeals court to be shocked. Ms. Thompson, a
56-year-old single woman, seems to have lost her home and spent four months in
prison simply for doing her job. Ms. Thompson, who spent years in the travel
industry before becoming a state employee, was responsible for putting the
state’s travel account up for competitive bid. Mr. Biskupic claimed that she
awarded the contract to an agency called Adelman Travel because its C.E.O.
contributed to Mr. Doyle’s campaign.</P>
<P>To charge her, Mr. Biskupic had to look past a mountain of evidence of
innocence. Ms. Thompson was not a Doyle partisan. She was a civil servant, hired
by a Republican governor, with no identifiable interest in politics. She was
only one member of a seven-person committee that evaluated the bidders. She was
not even aware of the Adelman campaign contributions. She also had a good
explanation for her choice: of the 10 travel agencies that competed, Adelman
submitted the lowest-cost bid.</P>
<P>While Ms. Thompson did her job conscientiously, that is less clear of Mr.
Biskupic. The decision to award the contract — the supposed crime — occurred in
Madison, in the jurisdiction of Wisconsin’s other United States attorney. But
for reasons that are hard to understand, the Milwaukee-based Mr. Biskupic swept
in and took the case.</P>
<P>While he was investigating, in the fall of 2005, Mr. Biskupic informed the
media. Justice Department guidelines say federal prosecutors can publicly
discuss investigations before an indictment only under extraordinary
circumstances. This case hardly met that test.</P>
<P>The prosecution proceeded on a schedule that worked out perfectly for the
Republican candidate for governor. Mr. Biskupic announced Ms. Thompson’s
indictment in January 2006. She went to trial that summer, and was sentenced in
late September, weeks before the election. Mr. Biskupic insisted in July, as he
vowed to continue the investigation, that “the review is not going to be tied to
the political calendar.”</P>
<P>But the Thompson case was “the No. 1 issue” in the governor’s race, says the
Wisconsin Democratic Party chairman, Joe Wineke. In a barrage of commercials,
Mr. Doyle’s opponents created an organizational chart that linked Ms. Thompson —
misleadingly called a “Doyle aide” — to the governor. Ms. Thompson appeared in
an unflattering picture, stamped “guilty,” and in another ad, her name was put
on a graphic of jail-cell doors slamming shut.</P>
<P>Most of the eight dismissed prosecutors came from swing states, and Democrats
suspect they may have been purged to make room for prosecutors who would help
Republicans win close elections. If so, it might also mean that United States
attorneys in all swing states were under unusual pressure.</P>
<P>Wisconsin may be the closest swing state of all. President Bush lost it in
2004 by about 12,000 votes, and in 2000, by about half that. According to some
Wisconsin politicians, Karl Rove said that their state was his highest priority
among governor’s races in 2006, because he believed a Republican governor could
help the party win Wisconsin in the 2008 presidential election.</P>
<P>Mr. Biskupic insists that he prosecuted Ms. Thompson only because he believed
a crime was committed, and that he did not discuss the political implications of
the case or the timing with anyone in the Justice Department or the White House.
Congress has asked the Justice Department for all e-mail messages about the case
to help resolve the matter.</P>
<P>But even if there were no discussions, Mr. Biskupic may have known that his
bosses in Washington expected him to use his position to help Republicans win
elections, and then did what they wanted.</P>
<P>That would be ironic indeed. One of the biggest weaknesses in the case
against Ms. Thompson was that to commit the crime she was charged with she had
to have tried to gain personally from the contract, and there’s no credible
evidence that she did. So Mr. Biskupic made the creative argument that she
gained by obtaining “political advantage for her superiors” and that in pleasing
them she “enhanced job security for herself.” Those motivations, of course, may
well describe why Mr. Biskupic prosecuted Ms.
Thompson.</P></DIV></DIV></BODY></HTML>