Carona has lots of company

The sheriff need not feel like the Lone Ranger.

Orange County Sheriff Mike Carona’s indictment last week on federal corruption charges puts him in the company of federal judges, police chiefs, county supervisors, members of city councils, former governors and sheriffs from one end of the country to the other.

The good news for Carona is that the government doesn’t always win.

The bad news is that an informal legal debate over the years about the government’s involvement in prosecuting local and state officials seems to have ended in a consensus win for the feds.

The other bad news for the man once dubbed “America’s Sheriff” is that the government tends to take its sweet time putting corruption cases together, especially in high-profile prosecutions like that involving Carona.

“One of the truisms is that a federal prosecutor has the luxury of time and resources that local prosecutors just don’t have,” says Marc Greenberg, a former assistant U.S. attorney in the Los Angeles and Orange County offices who now is in private practice. The reason, he says, is that local prosecutors have at any given time far more cases to handle.

“I always felt,” he says of his 11 years on the job, “that I had the luxury of spending as much time as I needed to investigate a matter.”

Plus, there was backup. Before any federal prosecutor would file charges in a high-profile case, it almost certainly would be reviewed all the way back to Washington, Greenberg says.

Out of deference to law enforcement?

Not solely for that reason, says Greenberg, who I asked to speak generically about the feds’ approach to prosecuting local public officials.

Aside from it being the proper thing to do, he says, spending ample time on high-profile cases is important “because you want to be right, particularly in a case like this where you’re trying to take down the county sheriff.”

U.S. Department of Justice statistics indicate that 241 “local officials” in the United States were convicted on corruption charges in 2006, either as the result of trials or guilty pleas. An additional 116 state officials were convicted.

The report did not indicate how many other cases ended in acquittal or were dismissed.

The statistics, part of a required “Report to Congress,” give historical perspective, however: the 241 convictions in 2006 were about the same as in the previous two years. Between 1987 and 2006, the annual number of convictions of local officials on federal corruption charges ranged from 119 to 272.

Not everyone is a fan of the federal government intruding on local turf. “It’s a highly debatable issue,” says Boston College law professor George Brown, who has written on the subject and has come to support federal involvement in some cases.

But, he says, the other side’s argument -- generally framed as a “state’s rights” issue -- is not a frivolous one. Brown isn’t familiar with details of the Carona case, but notes that someone could argue, rhetorically, “What is the national interest in how a local sheriff runs his local office?”

Federal intervention in local and state matters spiked in the 1970s, Brown says, with the creation of the Public Integrity Section of the Justice Department. Over the years, Congress has strengthened the federal government’s ability to press such cases.

The legal basis of some of the charges against Carona goes back at least as far as 1981 when a Nassau County, N.Y., supervisor was convicted on corruption charges.

In that case, Brown says, an appellate court upheld the federal government’s intervention, but a dissenting judge “questioned whether it was the job of the federal government to come in and police state and local officials when, at least in theory, there are state and local mechanisms available to do the very same job without the national government sort of riding in on a white horse, picking and choosing targets of opportunity, which tend to be high-profile cases.”

Brown says he’s grappled with the issue but has come to support federal interventions, mainly because the cases often involve allegations that wealthy people are involved in the corruption.

That, Brown argues, leads “to a skewing of the political marketplace in favor of the wealthy by illegitimate means.”

Even without knowing the Carona case details, Brown’s general assessment of things doesn’t bode well for the sheriff.

The government probably wouldn’t be this far along if it didn’t think it had a solid case, Brown says.

That puts pressure on a defendant to cop a plea -- something Carona hasn’t done so far.

Beyond that, Brown says, “one of the sad things about corruption cases, one of the problems with it as a [legal] field, is that the mere accusation of it can hurt a person’s political career, and an indictment is a serious blow to anybody’s political career, let alone a trial and conviction.”

Carona, less than a year into his third term, is taking a 60-day sabbatical.

Maybe he feels lucky or absolutely certain of his innocence.

The smart money, I’d argue, is that there’ll be a plea before the new year dawns.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.