This is an opinion column.

When state lawmakers say district attorneys should prosecute ethics crimes, not the Attorney General’s office nor the Ethics Commission, mind what they mean, not what they say.

To see why, look no further than Jefferson County.

When a Jefferson County grand jury indicted Trey Glenn and Scott Phillips on state ethics charges, their defense lawyers went to work, throwing every brick and timber on the tracks, to derail the case against them from ever going to trial.

(It’s a tricky case worth its own column, but today I want to focus on just one little piece of it that’s important to everybody right now.)

The defense lawyers contend that the Alabama Ethics Commission staff got involved in the case in the wrong way.

(Again, we’ll come back to that another day.)

And to make their case, they introduced an affidavit from former Jefferson County acting District Attorney Mike Anderton.

(This is what we’re here for.)

In that affidavit, Anderton says he made it clear to the Ethics Commission staff that his office didn’t have the resources to prosecute the case against Glenn and Phillips.

“I told (Ethics Commission General Counsel) Raulston that I would facilitate her appearance before the grand jury but that my office did not have the resources to support her case,” Anderton wrote. “I also told her that she would have to prosecute the case herself.”

Here’s the important thing here: The Jefferson County District Attorney’s office didn’t have the resources to prosecute a state ethics case.

Mind you, this should have been an easy lift. Most, if not all, of the evidence from that case came out of a federal case against a Balch & Bingham lawyer, Joel Gilbert, and Drummond vice president David Roberson. The feds did the hard work for them.

Also, Anderton’s office had received a complaint. People had walked into the courthouse and said to his staff, roughly paraphrasing here, “Hey, these guys are breaking the law and we need you to do something about that.”

Yet Anderton elected to do nothing and instead to pass the potato to the Ethics Commission. This was the top law enforcement officer in the largest county in the state saying under oath that his office was not equipped to do its job.

That’s bad.

And here’s worse.

This week, 11 state Senators, including Alabama Senate Pro Tem Del Marsh, introduced a bill to gut Alabama’s ethics laws. In addition to making gifts from lobbyists to public officials completely legal again, and on top of making bribes less than $6,000 a misdemeanor, this bill would do something else.

SB230 takes responsibility for investigating and prosecuting ethics crimes away from the Alabama Ethics Commission completely, and it puts that responsibility solely in the hands of district attorneys.

District attorneys who lack the staff, money and experience prosecuting white collar crimes and public corruption.

District attorneys with political considerations of their own.

When handled by the Attorney General or federal prosecutors, corruption cases typically take years to investigate and prosecute, nevermind the years of appeals that can follow. These are protracted, expensive legal battles.

If Jefferson County’s district attorney can’t handle a public corruption case, how is a district attorney in Clay County supposed to? Or Clarke? Or Crenshaw?

The lawmakers who drafted this bill know good and well what district attorneys are equipped to handle and what they’re not. If they don’t know, then they’re willfully ignorant.

A school lunchroom worker stealing from the cash register?

Yeah, a DA can make that case.

A lawmaker or governor stealing out of your pocket?

Not in a lifetime.

Which is exactly how they want it.

Kyle Whitmire is the state political columnist for the Alabama Media Group.

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