Last week’s Indiana Supreme Court ruling written by Chief Justice Brent Dickson makes numerous references to a 2003 ruling by the same court – and also written by Dickson. That case, Embry vs.Charlie White blamed everyone but himself after being ousted as Indiana secretary of state following his felony conviction last weekend.
“Mitch Daniels has voted incorrectly” in the last 10 elections, White said, accusing Daniels of falsely claiming the governor’s residence as his true home. Sen. Richard Lugar and ex-Sen. Evan Bayh are also guilty of false home addresses, White charged in a Sunday interview on Fox News.
His felony conviction was “a total miscarriage of justice and it’s a perversion.” He even backhandedly criticized the jury’s timing of its verdict, describing “what happened to devastate my family at 2 in the morning.”
But he saved his most vicious attack for Democrat Vop Osili, whom White defeated in the 2010 election. Though it was the Indiana Democratic Party chairman who filed a challenge to White’s residency, White castigated Osili for questioning his true residence.
“What Vop Osili did was savage to my family. What he did was barbaric,” White said, accusing Osili of “having no sense of being a gentleman, trying to file something to destroy someone’s family.”
Little did it matter to White that a jury agreed with the main complaint in the Democratic challenge: that White didn’t live where he said he did when he voted and ran for office.
“In Indiana we are a state of men, not of laws,” White said three times in the Fox interview, borrowing from a 1770 quote from John Adams and apparently meaning that better-known politicians got a pass where he did not.
All this from a man who, when first confronted with the residency allegation, said he was so busy campaigning that he forgot to change his address. Later, though, he claimed he was actually living where he was registered.
On Sunday, White suggested he was going to take the offensive on the issue, saying “you’re going to hear a lot more from me on the application of law.”
Perhaps, but it’s more likely that his defense attorney, former Marion County Prosecutor Carl Brizzi, will advise White to watch what he says pending sentencing. Judges tend to want defendants to express remorse rather than scorn.
Quick replacement
Daniels quickly appointed Jerry Bonnet, who had been White’s chief deputy, as interim secretary of state. State law makes clear that White lost his job as soon as he was convicted of a felony. State law requires that the court certify the conviction before White could be replaced, and it appears little time was wasted in that happening. The Indiana Law Blog posted a fax of the notice the Hamilton County clerk sent at 2:38 a.m. Saturday, just after White was found guilty.
