Misuse of Office/Special

Imagine that you're a county supervisor with a $92,000 salary and, despite the salary, you're allowed to hold an outside job (because the county supervisors before you gave you, and themselves, this opportunity). With a sizeable salary, there would appear to be no reason to work in any field that would create an appearance of impropriety.

A few issues arise in the case of a Pennsylvania state senator who reached a settlement this week with the state's ethics commission that included a fine of $21,000, according to an article in yesterday's Montgomery County Times Herald.

Pennsylvania state senators are paid for the rental of their district offices. This senator's wife (and then the senator himself after their...

For the second time in a year, a local ethics commission has been the subject of a grand jury report. The first was San Francisco's (see my blog post). There, it was a civil grand jury and the focus was on the commission. Here and now, it is a criminal grand jury, and the focus is on the county executive and other officials, as well as ethics commission members. The...

There has been a controversy (which I missed when it originally arose a few months ago) regarding what Mitt Romney and his aides did with their government computer hard drives when Romney left office as governor of Massachusetts. According to an article in the Boston Globe, Romney and his aides purchased 17 hard drives, for $...

Former Maricopa County, AZ county attorney Andrew Thomas (with one of his assistants) was disbarred on Tuesday on numerous counts related to bringing false charges against other county officials over a period of years, according to an article in yesterday's Arizona Republic. According to Prof. Bennett Gershman of Pace University, "...

I have written about the need for ethics commissions to go beyond the criminal enforcement paradigm, which limits commissions to determining whether an individual respondent has violated an ethics provision or not. It is hard to find instances of a commission looking at the bigger picture, that is, at the common practices and unwritten rules that underlie an individual's ethical misconduct. I read about such an instance...