Enforcement/Penalties

Should elected officials be held to a higher standard than ordinary people? And if so, who should decide?

These questions are central to a dispute that has been simmering for two years in El Paso. According to an article in the El Paso Times yesterday, the local district attorney would not allow a council member charged with a misdemeanor to participate in a diversion program for first-time...

What's an ethics commission to do? Even ethics commissions with teeth, that is, with the ability to fine officials, rarely have a way of actually collecting the fines. And if they do have a way of collecting fines, it can make things look unfair.

Take South Carolina, whose ethics commission has jurisdiction over local government officials.  According to its online debtors' list,...

The next round of memoranda have been filed by the parties to the Dixon case, where the Baltimore mayor (though the case relates to her activities as council president) is raising a defense of legislative immunity in a criminal proceeding for perjury (relating to failure to disclose) to keep out evidence that she knew that a developer who gave her many gifts was involved in a development with the city.

Her first defense of legislative immunity led to the indictment being dismissed...

A week ago I wrote a blog post about preferential treatment, emphasizing that the way to distinguish preferential treatment from ordinary decisions and transactions, where someone is commonly preferred over others, is by whether the treatment is fair and whether the regular process is followed.

Fairness is the principal issue in a preferential treatment question...

Both times Maricopa County Supervisor Don Stapley has had criminal charges brought against him, the counts included perjury charges for omissions on disclosure forms (2008 charges, 2009 charges). Is this the best or even an...

Last's week's Economist provides a look at a new form of local government ethics enforcement in China, which exists because local governments have failed to institute ethics programs. That form of enforcement is murder, and it appears to be increasingly accepted by the courts.