This year’s legislative session is expected to be relatively brief, with lawmakers anxious to get back to campaigning for an earlier-than-usual primary due in May. One idea worthy of their attention while they are in town is a proposal to create statewide grand juries.
The idea is to make it easier to investigate and prosecute public corruption anywhere in the state, without relying on district attorneys who may be reluctant to take on powerful city and county officials.
“We have taken … a very small step in the last year to try to curb some practices that are just unsavory,” said state Sen. Josh McKoon, R-Columbus, one of the chief champions of last year’s effort to cap the value of lobbyists’ gifts to legislators and now the sponsor of a bill to create statewide grand juries.
“But the truth is that the bulk of the problem that we’re dealing with tends to happen at the local level, and it also has to do with proper enforcement of our existing body of law. … So this is a vital step if we want to say we’re taking steps to protect the public from corruption at the state and local level.”
The bill would allow the attorney general to ask the state Supreme Court to empanel a grand jury with the authority to review allegations of public corruption anywhere in the state. Such a change would require a constitutional amendment, which needs the approval of two-thirds of House and Senate members and then a majority of voters in a November referendum.
Political pressure on local prosecutors may prevent some corruption cases from ever seeing a courtroom, McKoon argued.
“So this provides … a critical tool, for the attorney general’s office to say, this happened in Muscogee County, we’re going to go over to Bibb County, and have a grand jury look at this, because they’ll be free of the political influence in the home county,” he said.
McKoon pointed to the cheating scandal in Atlanta Public Schools, and more recent allegations that officials at the state ethics commission tampered with a probe of Gov. Nathan Deal’s 2010 campaign finances, as cases in which Georgia needed an established process rather than having to “reinvent the wheel” each time.
“We have these kinds of issues come up often,” he said. “Maybe not even criminal issues, but they require a vetting by an entity the public has confidence in.”
While McKoon has advocated giving the ethics commission more autonomy from lawmakers, including over its finances, he argued this is a separate matter.
“The commission is more here to call balls and strikes of filings” by lobbyists and for campaign finance, he said. “They don’t have prosecutorial authority, and I don’t think they should. But somebody should have that.”
Too often, McKoon said, Georgia relies on federal prosecutors to enforce its own public corruption laws. He noted the 2012 federal indictment of Gwinnett County Commissioner Shirley Lasseter and the joint state-federal arrest last month of Richmond County’s coroner as examples.
“It’s kind of like when you see a roach crawl across the floor. Just because you see one, there tends to be more in the walls,” he said. “You have a U.S. Attorney’s office with limited resources doing the best they can, but if we had the legal mechanism in place for the state to do it, we could find more to root out and ultimately reduce the number of these types cases.”
