Deja Vu in the Tire Slashing Case

So it turns out that all of the "Milwaukee 5" tire slashing defendants - except one, who was acquitted - have pleaded no contest to reduced charges, misdemeanors.

It's deja vu all over again. In 2004, after initially filing 92 felony charges in an alleged election fraud forgery scheme, Milwaukee County District Attorney E. Michael McCann's office ended up reducing almost all of them to misdemeanors without hope of getting much jail time.

That action had come after an acquittal. McCann's office had alleged the African American Coalition for Empowerment (ACE) had forged absentee ballots in a recall election against County Board Chairman Lee Holloway.

First, a couple words in fairness to McCann's office. Election fraud cases can be extremely difficult to prove. In the case of the tire slashings, the state by necessity had to rely on the testimony of out-of-state operatives who allegedly hadn't all been entirely cooperative on the front end. The prosecution was probably justifiably worried about potential outright acquittals of all, and decided it was better to convict the defendants of something, than nothing. It's hard to argue with that.

But the frustrating thing is that McCann's office has been notoriously ineffective in prosecuting election violations overall, and the vast majority of the allegations in Wisconsin have been lodged in his jurisdiction and ended up not prosecuted or under-played. The Gary George forged nomination papers. The smokes-for-votes scandal. The 300+ felons who voted illegally in the 2000 presidential election. Marvin Pratt's campaign problems. Humphrey Pushcart. On and on.

In an extremely open election system like ours (same-day registration and no photo ID requirement), it's important to have aggressive, tough prosecution of election-law violations so that there's SOME deterrent against people doing it. In that light, I almost would have preferred to see McCann's office finally up the ante and bet the house. After all, the deals were struck after only six hours of deliberations in a trial that lasted almost seven days.

By the way, imagine the reaction if the defendants were the children of, say, Jim Sensenbrenner, and they were prosecuted by a Republican DA and got a plea bargain. Imagine the outcry.