PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Rhode Island is a state famous for its public corruption, from the racketeering trial of former Providence Mayor Buddy Cianci to a rogues’ gallery of lawmakers, governors and even judges accused or convicted of abusing their offices for personal gain.
Those cases have tended to be the province of federal prosecutors, in part because federal corruption statutes ban a host of corrupt practices not covered under fairly limited state corruption laws.
Elected last fall, Attorney General Peter F. Kilmartin is hoping to change that with a bill that would expand the toolbox state prosecutors have at their disposal to bring charges against corrupt public officials.
The legislation — introduced in the House and Senate earlier this spring — proposes to forbid government officials from influence peddling or depriving the public of their “honest services,” among other corrupt acts that fall short of outright bribery. It would also increase the statute of limitations for corruption charges from three years to 10 years, allow the state to revoke the pe nsions of employees convicted on corruption charges and compel those convicted to forfeit their ill-gotten gains.
The parallel House and Senate bills had their first hearings in committee this month.
“In these times of budgetary strain and government distrust, the citizens of Rhode Island need assurance that their government, at all levels, is working to further the public good,” Kilmartin wrote in a letter to the House and Senate committees considering the legislation.
Rhode Island is no stranger to corruption. Cianci, the Providence mayor, spent four years in prison for racketeering conspiracy; two state Supreme Court chief justices have resigned since 1986, one over his reputed ties to organized crime figures; and former Gov. Edward DiPrete went to prison for bribery.
And although unrelated, the legislation comes as federal prosecutors wrap up a widely publicized corruption case involving a brazen bribery and extortion scheme orchestrated by three North Providence town councilmen. The men ultimately admitted to demanding tens of thousands of dollars in bribe payments from developers and small business owners seeking zoning and licensing changes. They were sentenced last week to between five and 6 1/2 years in federal prison.
Those kinds of cases could be handled on the state level more often if Kilmartin’s bill passes, said Michael J. Marcello, a state lawmaker who sponsored the House version of the bill.
“I think the more the attorney general’s office can get involved in local crimes, the more we all benefit,” Marcello said. “It looks like we’re taking care of our own rather than relying on the federal government to do it for us.”
But even with such tools, there are reasons why federal prosecutors may be best equipped to go after state and municipal corruption, according to David Zlotnick, a professor and associate dean at Roger Williams Law School and a former prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office for the District of Columbia.
In general, Zlotnick said, a U.S. attorney tends to have access to a broader and more potent array of investigative tools and fewer potential conflicts of interest than a popularly elected attorney general.
“When there’s entrenched corruption in local government, it’s largely taken the federal government’s resources and independence to knock this stuff out,” he said.
Kilmartin’s bill would also codify a permanent unit in the attorney general’s office dedicated to rooting out and prosecuting officials who violate the public trust.
Kilmartin’s measure is the fourth attempt in as many years to pass stricter corruption laws in Rhode Island. His predecessor, Patrick Lynch, tried for three years unsuccessfully to enact broader corruption legislation that Kilmartin, then a state lawmaker, sponsored. Those bills never made it out of committee.
This year, Kilmartin’s office is optimistic that the bill will have a better chance of passage, according to Joee Lindbeck, a special assistant attorney general and legislative director for the office.
A summer 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld but significantly narrowed the definition of the federal “honest services” statute overcomes one stumbling block in past years, Lindbeck said. She said lawmakers had questioned the constitutionality of Lynch’s bills, which mirrored the federal statute, because of the pending constitutional challenge.
Another encouraging sign is the scant testimony against it in committee hearings earlier this month, Lindbeck said.
Steven Brown, executive director of the Rhode Island chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said his organization opposes, on First Amendment grounds, one component of the bill that would forbid many state contractors and many of those bidding on state contracts from contributing to the campaigns of officials involved in awarding those contracts.
Open opposition by legislators to the bill is unlikely, given the political difficulty of such a position, and there is no evidence of it so far. But lawmakers could simply hold the bill and let it quietly die in committee as they have in past attempts to reform Rhode Island’s public corruption statutes.
In 2008, Lynch said at the time, the first reaction legislators had to his corruption bill was, “Uh, is this just about legislators?”