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?

According to an article in yesterday's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette [1], former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee thinks not. The Arkansas Ethics Commission director disagrees.

Click here to read the rest of this blog entry. [2]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research, City Ethics