Experts Split on Jail Time for Pete Rose

Legal experts were divided today over whether Pete Rose will have to serve jail time for his income tax offenses.

“It’s a total wild card. You never know what the outcome is going to be,” former Abscam prosecutor Thomas P. Puccio said. “There is no usual thing. The tendency has been to treat each one of these cases on its own facts. If you commit a bank robbery, you go to jail. With tax charges, it’s not so clear.”

Rose pleaded guilty today to filing false federal income tax returns for 1985 and 1987. He could get up to six years in prison and a $500,000 fine, but U.S. District Judge S. Arthur Spiegel probably will not sentence him for several months.

“Pete Rose was a legend and a hero to so many of us baseball fans. But if he seriously violated our tax laws, he should not be treated like a legend but like anybody else and face the prospect of hard jail time,” New York state Atty. Gen. Robert Abrams said.

Hotel queen Leona Helmsley took her tax case to trial last year and was sentenced to four years and fined $7.1 million. However, she was convicted on 33 counts--including conspiracy, evasion and fraud charges--and was accused of avoiding $1.8 million in taxes. Rose admitted under-reporting his income by $354,968 over a four-year period.

“My own view is that neither Pete Rose nor Leona Helmsley belongs in jail,” said Harvard Law School professor Alan M. Dershowitz, Helmsley’s appellate lawyer. “But whatever the appropriate sentence is in this should be equally applicable to a fallen baseball hero as well as to the wife of a hotel chain magnate.

“If he ends up getting a lesser sentence than she got, a think a lot of Americans will regard it as sexist justice and improper justice. My hope is that neither serve any time in prison. I think both have been punished enough by the public outcry and the public scrutiny of their lives.”

Steven B. Duke, a law professor at Yale, thinks Rose probably will do time.

“It is the position of the Justice Department that tax evaders should go to jail,” Duke said. “It would be rather hard for a judge to say that an exception should be made here. But it wouldn’t be outrageous for him not to go to jail. Maybe weekends or something like that.”