Spare me, judge. I may have murdered my parents but you wouldn't send an orphan to jail, would you?
Lawyers for former House Speaker Dennis Hastert asked a federal court on Wednesday to sentence him to probation, arguing the Illinois Republican has already been tormented by damage to his reputation after his indictment for giving hush money to a former student he allegedly sexually abused.
For the record, the allegations are that as a high school wrestling coach Hastert sexually abused at least four of his students in the 1970s. He's not being charged with that, though, only with evading banking laws in his later attempts to pay "hush money" to one of the students. And he feels really bad about that, but feels that the "public shaming" he has received is punishment enough.
[The filing] highlights the removal of his portrait from the U.S. Capitol and the elimination of his name from public landmarks, saying: "Mr. Hastert has been stung by the public repudiations of him that followed his indictment."
Hastert, who is now in ill health that his lawyers argue stemmed from his public shaming, could get as much as five years in prison for "structuring" the bank payments to avoid federal detection. He almost certainly won't, because he is A Fine Upstanding Fellow (i.e. has money) and we don't like sending people like that to prison. But I do wonder how many criminals argue that having the public find out about all the bad stuff they did is punishment enough, and how often judges go along with that.
