Deaver, Citing Financial Burden, Drops Perjury Appeal

Maintaining his innocence but declaring he must “put this period of my life behind me,” former White House aide Michael K. Deaver on Friday dropped his appeal of his 1987 perjury conviction and said he would start serving his suspended sentence.

Deaver, once a close confidant of former President Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy, said the “financial burden” of his continuing legal bills was a factor in his decision to “get on with whatever lies ahead.”

Deaver soon will begin serving his sentence--1,500 hours of community service--while reporting to a probation officer for three years. The fact that Deaver had not been sentenced to a prison term had caused some Washington lawyers to say privately last year that Deaver’s appeal was unwise.

Similar Thought

Deaver expressed a related thought in his statement when he said:

“To proceed with the appeal means to continue to live in doubt, to continue to wait for a decision and, if my appeal is successful, to face another trial, a process which could mean another two years of agony and doubt.”

Deaver, a former deputy White House chief of staff who began a multimillion-dollar lobbying business after leaving the government in 1985, was convicted of lying about his lobbying activities to a congressional committee and to a federal grand jury.

Although Deaver decided not to present any defense at his trial, his appeal was based partly on the fact that U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson had told jurors to ignore the statements of some witnesses that Deaver appeared to be suffering from alcoholism. Deaver told reporters after his conviction that his memory had been clouded by the affliction when he testified before the investigating panels.

Service Not Disclosed

Jackson, who also fined Deaver $100,000, has not disclosed what his community service will involve. But Deaver has expressed an interest in working with recovered alcoholics like himself.

Deaver, 50, will become the first Reagan Administration figure to begin serving a sentence for a conviction growing out of his post-government lobbying work. Another former Reagan aide, Lyn Nofziger, 63, was convicted of illegal lobbying last February and was fined $30,000 and sentenced to 90 days in prison. Nofziger is free pending his appeal of the conviction.

Deaver, despite dropping his appeal, insisted that “my belief in my innocence has not changed from the day the long and arduous proceedings against me began three years ago.”

He has said that the federal investigation brought about the collapse of his lobbying firm, Michael K. Deaver & Associates, which grossed a reported $4.5 million in its first year.

Deaver said that continuing his legal fight “means continuing a financial burden that my family and I simply cannot bear . . . . Nor can I continue to ask my attorneys to represent me without any prospect of being paid.”

But he said that despite his legal and financial woes, “the love of my family and friends, the satisfaction of helping others afflicted with the disease of alcoholism and the inner peace I have achieved mean more to me than the decisions of courts or the pronouncements of commentators and politicians.”