When federal prosecutors recommended a lengthy prison term at Friday’s sentencing hearing for former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, defense lawyers called it outrageously “draconian.”

“The government seeks to condemn an 83-year-old man to die behind bars for crimes that enriched him not one penny,” Madigan lawyers countered in a filing submitted to U.S. Judge John Blakey.

Au contraire, say the feds, because “Madigan’s properly calculated guideline range is life imprisonment.”

There may not be much difference between the 12.5-year sentence recommendation for an 83-year-old and the life sentence prosecutors claim the law recommends.

But there is a huge difference between the defense claim that Madigan didn’t benefit monetarily from the Commonwealth Edison bribery conspiracy and prosecutor’s arguments that the cost was “at least $150 million.”

It all boils down to how one computes the extent of Madigan’s criminal conduct under federal sentencing guidelines that serve as recommendations to judges.

The guidelines date to 1987, when the Federal Sentencing Commission created a “uniform policy” for sentencing individuals and organizations in the federal system.

They represent a complicated formula that scores a broad range of personal and criminal conduct factors.

Prosecutors’ “adjusted offense level” was 50 — that’s high — calculated on Madigan’s “base offense” of bribery, multiple bribes over a period of years, the minimum $150 million value of his crimes, his status as an elected official, his role as the conspiracy’s “leader” and his effort to obstruct justice by lying on the witness stand.

In this case, ComEd lavished no-show jobs and unnecessary legal work on Madigan’s political associates to win his support for the company’s legislative agenda. Those benefits were estimated at $1.3 million, not close to $150 million. What’s up?

The $150 million represents what’s known in Chicago as a “corruption tax,” the collective extra costs all citizens pay for public misconduct.

Madigan contends he got “zero,” but federal law states that the issue is based on “the value of the payment” or “the benefit received,” “whichever is the greatest.”

“The value of the benefit ComEd received from the bribery scheme … far exceeded $150 million,” the government stated.

That came in the form of a rate hike that changed ComEd’s financial trajectory.

The Illinois Commerce Commission set out “costs” it did not allow ComEd to pass on to consumers that totaled roughly $1 billion between 2002 and 2010.

Under new rules set out under Madigan, ComEd recovered those previously forbidden costs. As a consequence, money poured in to ComEd coffers.

One witness testified that ComEd’s bond credit ratings improved from “middle-of-the-road debt to high-grade debt.”

Company officials expected “around $400 million in shareholder value would be obtained” from higher rates from 2018 to 2022.” They noted “that projection only covered a five-year period.”

Conversely, additional costs were imposed after the conspiracy became public and ComEd was targeted with shareholder lawsuits. The government contends that the $173 million ComEd paid to settle those claims represents “an alternate measure of loss.”

Prosecutors argued that was one form of public costs. They also cited another that resulted from Madigan’s feud with Juan Ochoa, who ran McCormick Place. Ochoa sought to restructure McCormick’s bond debt as a cost-saving measure. But Madigan would not permit it until Ochoa resigned.

Prosecutors said the Ochoa feud was costly because “failure to pass the debt restructuring during Ochoa’s tenure meant that (the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority) — that is, Illinois taxpayers — had to pay half a billion dollars in interest on loans that restructuring would have prevented.”

Originally published on this site