But for a dubious decision by a federal appeals court, former Rep. Corrine Brown of Jacksonville would still be serving out a five-year prison sentence for tax fraud and running an $800,000 scam charity. Instead, she’s running for Congress again, piling on the Democrats’ mounting political woes in Florida.
Brown, 75, is a convicted felon. She avoided a retrial and possible return to prison by pleading guilty to a single felony count of corrupt obstruction of the internal revenue laws and was sentenced to time served of two years, eight months and nine days, and $62,650.99 in restitution to the government. She was one of three Black members elected to Congress from Florida in 1992 for the first time since Reconstruction.
Rehabilitation is a noble goal of the criminal justice system, but there are commonsense limits. It is the equivalent of a middle-finger gesture for Brown to now ask voters to entrust her again with a seat in Congress. There are more than enough other people with clean criminal records seeking the same high honor.
The trouble is, the field is so large that Brown could easily win the Democratic nomination with a trifling plurality in the primary. This is one of the baneful consequences of the Legislature having abolished Florida’s runoff primaries without providing anything better in its place — such as ranked-choice voting.
Brown is running in District 10, essentially the same constituency now represented by Rep. Val Demings, a former Orlando police chief who’s vacating her seat to run for the U.S. Senate.
Can’t make this up
Behold! A confessed crook aims to walk in the footsteps of a good cop. You can’t make this stuff up.
Brown doesn’t even live in the Orlando-based district, but she has represented portions of it in the past. The Constitution stipulates only that members of Congress live in the states they represent, not particular districts.
Ten Democrats, six Republicans and two independents have filed for the seat. Other well-known Democrats are former Rep. Alan Grayson and state Sen. Randolph Bracy of Orlando.
Grayson served three nonconsecutive terms in the House before losing a Senate bid in 2016. He was controversial for taking outspokenly liberal positions and for a complaint by the Office of Congressional Ethics, which alleged that he continued to receive compensation from a hedge fund he controlled while serving in Congress. The House Ethics Committee did not pursue it. Unlike Brown, Grayson was never charged with a crime.
As part of Brown’s plea deal, according to the Justice Department, she admitted underreporting income and overreporting charitable giving “by inflating total gifts.” The plea bargain did away with 17 other counts for which she had been convicted in 2017. By then, she had lost the 2016 Democratic primary for reelection in the 5th District, stretching from Jacksonville to Tallahassee, to state Sen. Al Lawson of Tallahassee.
It was the same district erased in April by Gov. Ron DeSantis’ partisan gerrymander.
Brown’s charges, which also included mail and wire fraud, were based on a phony “educational” charity she controlled that was used to finance personal expenses including parties, vacations, NFL tickets, a stadium box for a Beyoncé concert and shopping trips. She had served nearly half the sentence when she was released on bond, early in the pandemic, to await the outcome of her appeal to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals at Atlanta.
A replaced juror
That court voted 7-4 to overturn Brown’s conviction because U.S. District Judge Timothy Corrigan had replaced a juror after deliberations had begun, who told other jurors that God had told him Brown was innocent. Another juror alerted the judge.
The juror’s removal deprived Brown of her constitutional right to a unanimous jury verdict, the majority said. The court’s opinion said Corrigan did not establish that the juror would be unable to follow the court’s instructions on how to deliberate over the evidence.
“The district judge was mistaken in finding that no substantial possibility remained that he was rendering proper jury service,” said the opinion by Chief Judge William Pryor, one of the most conservative members of one of the most conservative federal courts in the country.
Two Trump appointees from Florida, Barbara Lagoa and Robert Luck, supported the majority opinion, which the court couched almost as a religious liberty issue.
“Juror No. 13′s expression that God had communicated with him may be construed as his description of an internal mental event, not an impermissible external instruction,” the opinion said.
"May be"? Had the juror listened to any other advice from outside the courtroom, he would have unmistakably violated the court’s instructions.
The four dissenters argued that the trial judge correctly decided that there was “no substantial possibility that a juror who said the Holy Spirit told him to acquit on all charges was basing his decision on the merits of the case.”
Corrine Brown caught an enormous break from an appeals court. She doesn’t deserve a second one from voters.
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