What, No Tipping the People’s Servants? (NYTimes.com) By DOROTHY SAMUELS
Published: November 27, 2006

If you think Washington’s culture of corruption is bad now and couldn’t get appreciably worse, my hunch is you don’t know about United States v. Valdes. This pending federal case could end up making it legal for public officials to accept gratuities for granting certain types of favored government treatment.

I know, you’re thinking that I must be exaggerating. Stuffing the pockets of government officials with cash to gain some sort of edge is plainly against the law, right? I’ve always thought so. That is, I did until last February, when a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals in Washington, splitting 2 to 1, overturned the conviction of a former District of Columbia police detective named Nelson Valdes.

The basic facts are not in dispute. In an effort to cover influence-peddling that may not rise to bribery, the federal gratuities law makes it a crime for a public official to seek or receive “anything of value personally for or because of any official act performed or to be performed.”

Mr. Valdes became an apparent violator by accepting hundreds of dollars in cash as reward for delving into computerized police records to obtain vehicle-registration and arrest-warrant information on drivers at the request of someone who — surprise — turned out to be an F.B.I. informant. Indicted for bribery, the detective was convicted by a jury of the “lesser-included offense” of receiving an illegal gratuity.

Incredibly, the appellate panel tossed out the conviction, finding the anti-gratuities prohibition didn’t apply because Mr. Valdes’s granting of preferential access to police information lacked a sufficiently “formal” relationship to a decision or action in fulfillment of his “official” public duties. Huh? Mr. Valdes enjoyed access to the police database only because of his official status. And it’s not as if researching the background of individuals is removed from a cop’s day-to-day job. Police officers do it every time they write a traffic ticket.

(More ... New York Times > OpEd > Editorial Observer)

Labels: New York Times, Opinion

  ¶ 07:41