The Capital Times story I linked to just below has another detail –
In addition the sides will recommend at a future sentencing date that Chvala be put on two years’ probation and the prosecutors will argue he be sent to jail for six months as a condition of that probation. Defense attorneys James Olson and Bruce Davey are free to argue for less, or no time in jail.
Yep, that’s right, the jail time isn’t agreed to.
Anyway, I somehow forgot to comment on the significance of all this in the earlier post. Chvala was hit with the laundry list after former State Sen. Brian Burke (D-Milwaukee) was hit with a laundry list indictment of his own, which derailed his 2002 bid for the soon-to-be-vacated Attorney General seat. With Burke’s plea-bargain deal, the pressure came off Milwaukee County DA E. Michael McCann’s office to push the Chvala prosecution, and he reverted to type, tossing out essentially the entire case, even though it was easily the strongest and furthest-reaching one from the entire Caucus scandal.
That one of the two guilty pleas was the use of state workers for campaigns on state time is no accident. That’s the sole basis of the remaining charges against various current and former Assembly Pubbies. That the corruption charges were tossed under the witch-hunt bus is disturbing, but to be expected from the office of McCan’t; he has a long history of minimizing corruption by ‘Rats.
