The Clinton administration has prosecuted many for the
same.
>>Name one and explain the circumstances, bonehead. I challenge you to find one.
Well here they are:
Friday, October 23, 1998
Other Federal Workers Pay High Price for Perjury
Courts: Two who lied about affairs are fired. One of them goes to prison;
the other loses medical license.
By RICHARD A. SERRANO, Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON--Diane Parker did what
President Clinton is accused of doing.
As a U.S. postal supervisor in Florida, she
had sex with a subordinate, lied about it and got
caught. As a result, she lost her job, was tried and convicted, and
now is serving 13 months in a federal prison.
Barbara Battalino had sex with a patient in her Veterans Affairs
office in Idaho. She lied about it and was caught and she lost her
job and medical license. Prosecuted, she pleaded guilty and was
fined $3,500. Today she is serving a six-month home-detention
sentence.
Parker and Battalino are but two of 115 people now serving
time for committing perjury in federal court proceedings--the same
charge that has brought President Clinton to the brink of
impeachment.
And they are now unwitting exhibits in the huge political battle in
Washington over how severely Clinton should be punished. While
his defenders argue that the presidency is too high a price to pay for
what boils down to lying about sex, some Republican lawmakers
insist that Clinton should be treated no less harshly than others
charged with perjury.
Those 115 cases offer no clear lesson on whether a double
standard exists, and the investigation that could remove Clinton
from office has just begun.
More Serious Charges at Start
But the vast majority of the cases began with more serious
charges that were dropped when the defendants pleaded guilty to
reduced charges of perjury.
In cases in which the primary charge is
perjury, as with Clinton's alleged lying in a legal
deposition and before a federal grand jury about
his affair with former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky, the
punishment of rank-and-file government employees can be quite
severe.
U.S. District Judge Lacey A. Collier in Panama City, Fla.,
clearly had the president in mind in July when he sent Parker to
prison for lying in a civil suit about having sexual relations with a
Postal Service subordinate.
Parker had been a model citizen. She was active in a local
community group, had attended college and served in the military.
Except for a traffic ticket some years back, she had never been in
trouble before. But Collier, a Bush appointee, let it be known that
perjury is no minor infraction.
"I must say, Ms. Parker, that one of the most troubling things in
our society today is people who raise their hands, take an oath to
tell the truth and then fail to do that," he said.
"An analogy might be made to termites that get inside your
house," he continued. "Nobody sees it, nobody knows about it until
the house collapses around you.
"And that's the seriousness of the destruction of . . . our system
of justice, our entire society for that matter. . . .
"And it goes all the way to the highest levels of our government."
The 115 federal perjury cases first surfaced when Republican
lawmakers used them as an argument for opening an impeachment
investigation of Clinton. It is not known how many of these cases
might have similarities to the president's.
Allegations for Impeachment Inquiry
"If we leave the president alone if he
committed these crimes, then we have
undermined our Constitution and we have
undermined our system of justice," Rep. Bill McCollum (R-Fla.)
said on the House floor recently as he urged that an impeachment
inquiry be opened.
McCollum obtained the number from the U.S. Bureau of
Prisons, which declined to provide information about specific cases.
Information about the Parker and Battalino cases was obtained by
The Times from law enforcement sources.
At the U.S. Justice Department, Stewart Smith, an official in the
Office of Justice Programs, said it can be very difficult to compare
one case to another.
He recalled a recent incident in which a National Institute of
Justice secretary was suspended for two weeks for lying about a
personal telephone call while at work--a punishment he said that
seems out of line when compared to the allegations of FBI crime lab
agents doctoring reports and lying on the witness stand about their
findings.
More than a year after the Justice Department's inspector
general found widespread abuses at the crime lab, there have been
no firings, prosecutions and no prison time. Of the 11 lab
employees who were criticized, two have received letters of
censure.
"There are different standards according to different agencies
and different people," said Smith, who also is a local union leader.
Citing the FBI lab, he added: "It shows you the vast disparity of
the things that go on around the government."
The Parker and Battalino cases are similar and appear basically
to parallel the case against Clinton. But they too ended with
different results.
Patient Suffered From Stress Disorder
Battalino was a VA psychiatrist when she first
met Ed Arthur, a highly decorated Vietnam War
veteran. He was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and
she counseled him on several occasions at the VA Medical Center
in Boise, Idaho.
As Battalino, who now lives in Los Osos, Calif., tells it, Arthur
was assigned to a different counselor when she met with him for a
couple of sessions in 1991 and suddenly found herself attracted to
him.
In separate interviews, both Battalino and Arthur recounted how
she performed oral sex on him in her office and how they later were
involved in an intimate relationship for several months.
But Arthur, while seeing a separate VA psychiatrist later,
confessed the affair and then sued the VA.
During a legal deposition in the lawsuit, Battalino was asked:
"Did anything of a sexual nature take place in your office on June
27, 1991?"
"No," she answered.
What she did not know was that Arthur had tape-recorded 26
hours of their telephone conversations. When Arthur told her on the
tapes that he had revealed to VA authorities that they had had sex
in her office, Battalino responded: "No. That's not what I told you
to do. Oh, you really screwed me and yourself too. . . . We were
supposed to have not had sex. . . . Oh wow. . . ! See honey, what
you have to do now is, you have to totally deny that we had
anything to do with each other there."
Arthur's lawsuit was eventually dismissed and he broke up with
Battalino and moved to Lancaster, Ohio. Today, he still distrusts
her. "She lied, big time," he said.
Battalino lost her federal job and resigned her
medical license. Charged in federal court with
perjury, she later agreed to a plea bargain and
last July was fined $3,500 and sentenced to six months of home
detention. She moved to Los Osos with her mother and she must
wear an ankle bracelet that allows court officials to ensure that she
stays home.
"I can't even go to the mailbox," she complained.
Clinton Must Pay, She Believes
Battalino believes that Clinton should pay a price at least as
harsh as hers.
"It's terrible; it's a disgrace," Battalino said. "I did one act, one
act of lying, and I wasn't even married. The other person wasn't
married either."
Arthur added: "Clinton committed perjury and his perjury is
worse than hers. But he won't resign."
Parker was a postal supervisor in Panama City when she fell for
a subordinate, James K. Collins. According to the U.S. attorney's
office, Parker told Collins that he would be promoted only if he had
sex with her and that they then had sexual relations, including once
on a trip to Georgia.
Collins filed an employment discrimination lawsuit in 1996,
alleging that he had been subjected to sexual harassment. In a legal
deposition in that suit, Parker lied about her relationship with
Collins, specifically about their trip to Georgia.
Collins won the suit in 1997 when a jury awarded him $10,000.
Federal prosecutors obtained a perjury indictment against Parker in
February.
She fought the charge but was convicted in May. Parker
appeared before Collier for sentencing in July. She asked for
mercy.
"Give me an opportunity to leave here and
live the rest of my life and go on with my life,"
she implored.
But the judge then made his termite analogy. Handing her 13
months in prison, he said: "This, I hope, is sufficient punishment for
you. But more importantly, I hope that it is a deterrence to others,
so your story can be taken far and wide to demonstrate to others
the seriousness of the responsibility of telling the truth in court
proceedings."
latimes.com |
