SEEING RED ABOUT WHITE-COLLAR CRIME

Say this for the United States Supreme Court. Those judges
passionately want to make the world safe for corporate biggies to give
money and gifts to government officials whose job it is to regulate
them.

Hence the court's decision last week to void the fine and conviction -
or actually uphold the overturning of the conviction - of Sun-Diamond
Growers of California, the agribusiness co-op, for giving some $5,900
worth of illegal gratuities - including $2,295 worth of tickets and
$2,427 worth of luggage - to then-Agreculture Secretary Mike Espy.

Black kids who get caught with crack can serve a much longer sentence
than whites with the same amount of cocaine, and the Robes only see
fit to give judges discretion to determine which kind of drug was
involved. They don't overturn the unequal laws.

But this Sun-Diamond fine, that's an injustice that must be
erased.

An opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia, approved unanimously,
found the conviction was wrong because the illegal-gratuity law
requires that prosecutors show that gifts were given "for or because
of any official act performed or to be performed by" the public
official, and that "official act," present or future, must be specified.

Special Counsel Donald Smaltz, to the contrary, contended that jurors
could convict without specifying what that act might be. Makes sense.
The bribery statute requires a clear quid pro quo. But gift
prohibitions deal with the broader issue of the impropriety of the
regulated trying to buy off the regulators who are supposed to be
public servants.

Why? Because when special interests give big gifts to officials with
welcoming palms, sometimes the fat cats forget to leave a note
specifying which regulation or legislation they want to influence.

Just as not all bank robbers write notes. But Scalia never wrote that
it is wrong to sentence a man just because he entered a bank armed and
left with cash, since there was no piece of paper proving that he
intended to rob the bank.

Sun-Diamond had two important chunks of business before Espy. Its
cooperatives have had the pleasure of spending your money, thanks to
the federal Market Promotion Program, to promote Sun-Diamond prunes
and raisins overseas. In 1993, Congress told Espy to give small
entities preference when handing out promotional funds. Sun-Diamond
had an interest in convincing Espy to look at their members as little
guys. (And what better way to make that point than with luggage?)

The giant cooperative also wanted Espy to convince the Environmental
Protection Agency to write friendly phase-out regs for a favored pesticide.

Scalia even wrote that the official act had to be specified, as
otherwise, "it would criminalize a high school principal's gift of a
school baseball cap to the secretary of education, by reason of his
office, on the occasion of the latter's visit to the school." Give me
a break.

By the same argument, Scalia should insist that courts prove intent to
use drugs in possession cases because overzealous prosecutors might go
after non-users who innocently possess $20 bills with trace elements
of drugs.

There are married couples who live their whole lives without giving
each other gifts totaling %,900.

Smaltz tried to convict Espy for receiving $35,000 in illegal gifts. A
jury found in Espy's favor last year.

One of the many sordid results of the Clinton administration is the
public's clear complacence with white-collar crime. Jurors don't mind
it.

The public doesn't want to know about it, while the Big Bench protects
it.