Acknowledging Ethics Violations in Settlements
<p>Should an agreement between an ethics
commission and a respondent, which ends an ethics proceeding, include
an acknowledgment by the respondent that he violated the ethics law?<br>
<br>
According to <a href="http://www.nwanews.com/adg/News/229231/" target="”_blank”">an
article in yesterday's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette</a>, former Arkansas
Governor Mike Huckabee thinks not. The Arkansas Ethics Commission
director disagrees.<br>
<br>
<a href="http://www.cityethics.org/node/459">Click here to read the rest of this blog entry.</a>
<br>
<br>
According to the article, Huckabee doesn't mind that the commission's
letter of caution finds him in violation of the ethics law, only that
it says he has acknowledged violating the law.<br>
<br>
The ethics commission director says that, for more than ten years,
language acknowledging a violation has been routinely included in
letters when cases have been resolved by written offers of settlement.<br>
<br>
In many criminal proceedings, defendants pay fines in return for
getting off without a conviction. However, ethics proceedings rarely
involve convictions, and fines are often part of settlements that
include acknowledgments of violating an ethics provision. Here,
there was not even a fine, even though the former governor complied
with the law only after a finding of probable cause by the ethics
commission.<br>
<br>
Since there is no criminal record involved nor possibility of
incarceration, I do not believe that there should be any problem in a
respondent's acknowledging what he or she has done. In fact, this
makes it less likely that someone will do the same thing again, and
prevention and guidance are the most important things in any ethics
program.<br>
<br>
A governor who breaks an ethics law that he signed should publicly
apologize for it. Acknowledging what he did is only the very
first step in such an apology, and yet Huckabee does not want to take
it. Instead, he wants to be specially excepted from the ethics
commission's ordinary ways of handling settlements. He and his lawyer
do not seem to understand that government ethics seeks to end such
special treatment. Or maybe they just don't care.<br>
<br>
Robert Wechsler<br>
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics<br>
</p>