A recent article noting that former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick had been transferred between prisons, combined with rumors that President Trump might commute the sentence of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich made me think about the fairness of Kilpatrick's 28-year prison sentence.
According to a 2016 Washington Post article, only one other person has ever been sentenced to more than 20 years for political corruption. In fact, they only list four that got more then 15 years and they seem to involve extreme cases, like Rita Crundwell embezzling $54 million from Dixon, Illinois, a town of 15,000 people.
“Kilpatrick was a crook and made bad governance decisions to boot. ... But it's hard to believe he should spend more time in prison than Blago or Silver.”
Rod Blagojevich was sentenced to 14 years. Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin thinks that sentence was “outrageous” and supports commutation. Another former Illinois governor, George Ryan, only served about six years, despite his corruption leading to the deaths of six children in a fiery crash involving debris from a semi driven by someone who paid bribes to get his commercial drivers license. That WaPo article I mentioned was prompted by former New York Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver getting 14 years in his original trial (the verdict was overturned on appeal), which it labeled “one of the longest prison sentences for a politician.” It seems to be rare for anyone to get more than 10 years in a public corruption case.
It may well be that more politicians should get longer sentences for corruption. But Kilpatrick's is far out of line with sentencing norms. He got more than double what the average rapist serves — the kind of time usually meted out to killers and such. And since he's in federal prison, he will have to serve something like 85 percent of his sentence.
Just as Detroit itself has sometimes been treated as a ritual scapegoat onto which other cities can project blame or focus for urban ills, Kilpatrick seems to have been latched onto as someone to whom the modern dysfunction of Detroit can be transferred.
Kilpatrick was a crook and made bad governance decisions to boot. He certainly deserved a good long prison sentence. But it's hard to believe he should spend more time in prison than Blago or Silver.
If Trump really wanted to commute someone's sentence, rather than Blago's, a better idea would be to reduce Kwame's sentence to a more reasonable 14 years.
This piece originally appeared at Crain's Chicago Business
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Aaron M. Renn is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in Crain's Chicago Business