What went around, later came around at Sutton hearing
Bob Mercer
February 3, 2007
Watertown Public Opinion
PIERRE -- The lawyers for the sexual misconduct hearing against
state Sen. Dan Sutton didn't get to pick a jury. Because the proceeding was
legislative rather than judicial, it was at its heart political.
What a tangled web of politics it was, stretching back years,
connecting in ways the participants perhaps understood, but lost for many
outsiders.
The lawyers for and against Sutton, D-Flandreau,
presented their evidence to a panel of nine senators who were appointed by the
Republican and Democratic leadership of the South Dakota Senate.
Among those on the panel, officially known as the Select
Committee on Discipline and Expulsion, was Sen. Gene Abdallah, R-Sioux Falls.
He knows first-hand what political machinations can do to a
person's career.
He saw his son Scott Abdallah forced to
withdraw from the front-runner's spot for a prestigious federal appointment as
U.S. attorney for South Dakota.
No one has ever suggested Gene
Abdallah, a former head of the South Dakota Highway Patrol and a former U.S.
marshal, can't cut through conflicting information to make up his own mind on
the facts of a situation.
But having Sen. Abdallah and Jim
McMahon in key roles at the hearing was an odd convergence.
McMahon was selected as the U.S. attorney for South Dakota when
Scott Abdallah withdrew. McMahon, now in private practice again, was hired in
November by the Legislature's Executive Board to serve as its special counsel to
investigate the allegation against Sutton.
McMahon essentially
served as the Senate's prosecutor against Sutton.
Likewise, had
this been in a courtroom, it would have been unusual to have on the jury Senate
Democratic minority leader Scott Heidepriem of Sioux Falls. He was vice chairman
of the Sutton committee. A very successful attorney in private practice,
Heidepriem is a law partner of Scott Abdallah.
Another partner
in the Heidepriem-Abdallah law firm is Russ Janklow, the son of former Gov. Bill
Janklow. The elder Janklow served on McMahon's side as the personal attorney at
the Senate hearing for Sutton's accuser, 19-year-old Austin Wiese of Flandreau.
This web gets much more tangled.
Bill
Janklow was the No. 1 supporter in South Dakota for McMahon's appointment as
U.S. attorney. Still, it's doubly intriguing that Janklow would help the Wiese
family.
The accuser's father, Dennis Wiese, is a former
president of South Dakota Farmers Union. Bill Janklow truly, strongly dislikes
Dennis Wiese for things Janklow says were done against him politically by Wiese
in the past.
Janklow made clear at the hearing that he believed
Austin Wiese's story.
On the flip side, Sutton was one of a
handful of Democratic legislators to whom Janklow in his last term as governor
repeatedly reached out, through his senior staff, for help on key votes, when
too many of Janklow's fellow Republicans were digging in their heels against
one of his ideas.
Two of the biggest legislative fights in 2000, the sale of the state cement plant and the tobacco- settlement plan, come
to mind as examples when Sutton backed Janklow while most Democratic lawmakers
didn't.
Janklow, Sutton and the Wieses all grew up in the same
hometown of Flandreau. Janklow was leaving there, after stopping to visit his
mother, on the Saturday afternoon three summers ago when he drove through a stop
sign.
The crash instantly killed motorcyclist Randy Scott,
forced Janklow's resignation from the U.S. House of Representatives and sent
him to jail for 100 days.
The person who replaced Janklow in the
U.S. House was Democrat Stephanie Herseth, whom Janklow had beaten in the 2002
election. Prior to running for the House, Rep. Herseth served as executive
director for the South Dakota Farmers Union Foundation, where she worked closely
with SDFU's then-president Dennis Wiese.
When Janklow drove from
Brandon to Pierre for the Sutton hearing, he had just received his driver
license again. Janklow also has just recently resumed practicing law. One of the
lawyers who served on the disciplinary review committee that temporarily took
away Janklow's law license was Nancy Turbak.
Turbak,
D-Watertown, is now a state senator. She served on the Sutton hearing committee,
too. She was recruited by Heidepriem to run for the Legislature long before the
Sutton matter spilled into public light. She ran because Sen. Lee Schoenbeck, R
Watertown, chose to not seek reelection.
It was Dennis Wiese who
went to Schoenbeck in October demanding action from the Senate against Sutton,
because Attorney General Larry Long hadn't taken criminal action.
Schoenbeck then wrote the infamous letter to Sutton in mid-
October, threatening Sutton with an investigation and possible expulsion or
impeachment if he didn't resign.
This gets even more
tangled.
Schoenbeck is a brother-in-law of the Catholic priest
in Flandreau, Father Richard Fox. The Suttons and Wieses belong to the Catholic
parish in Flandreau.
Sutton had asked Austin Wiese last February
to meet with Father Fox about Wiese's allegations Sutton sexually touched
Wiese.
That meeting never took place.
Sutton was
alerted that a criminal case was being built against him when he was asked to
meet with a DCI agent, the day after Wiese called him to make the allegations.
The DCI was recording that telephone conversation.
The priest,
after learning about the allegations, immediately removed Sutton from teaching
the parish's confirmation class for teen-agers.
Schoenbeck
said he didn't learn about the criminal investigation against Sutton in about
May. Schoenbeck, the Senate president pro tempore, took no action and
didn't inform the Legislature's Executive Board until Wiese contacted
him a month before the Nov. 7 election.
When Sutton wouldn't
quit, Schoenbeck and other legislative leaders proceeded against him. Among the
people with whom Schoenbeck conferred was Jeremiah Murphy, the longest serving
lobbyist at the Legislature, and throughout the course of his decades at the
Capitol, perhaps the most powerful.
Murphy handles sexual-abuse
legal cases for the Sioux Falls Catholic diocese. McMahon, while not a partner
officially, shares the same office suite and administrative staff with Murphy.
That allows them to refer cases to one another when there is a possible
conflict.
Schoenbeck said he wrote the letter to Sutton because
suddenly felt pressured politically by Wiese because of a sex scandal unfolding
in Congress.
But Schoenbeck, who made no secret of his ambition
to run for governor in 2010, was on the rocks politically in October, as
Republicans faced the increasing possibility of losing their majority in the
state Senate.
Schoenbeck and other antiabortion conservatives
had engineered a purge in the June primaries of Republican senators who voted
against the 2006 abortion ban.
The strategy ousted Republican
incumbents such as Duane Sutton of Aberdeen, Stan Adelstein of Rapid City and
Clarence Kooistra of Garretson. The effort also defeated other Republican
primary candidates who were not strongly against legalized abortion.
The lack of incumbents helped Democrats pick up five seats in
November, including Turbak's victory over Schoenbeck's candidate to succeed
him, Dennis Arnold of Watertown.
Republicans went from 25 to 20
senators, while Democrats rose from 10 to 15. The change in proportion meant
Democrats also earned at least one more slot on the Sutton hearing committee.
The committee voted 6-3 a week ago to recommend the Senate
censure Sutton rather than expel him. The six were four Democrats: Heidepriem,
Turbak, Sen. Gary Hanson of Sisseton and Sen. Ben Nesselhuf of Vermillion.
The two Republicans were Abdallah and Sen. Ed Olson of Mitchell,
who led the push for the Sutton investigation in his role as the Executive Board
chairman.
The full Senate voted against expulsion 20-14. The 20
were all 14 present Democrats (Sutton left the floor during the voting) and six
Re
It's impossible to predict what might have happened in the
Sutton matter if the Republican abortion purge hadn't taken place last June,
and if Heidepriem and Sandy Jerstad of Sioux Falls hadn't taken out two more
Republican incumbents in the Nov. 7 elections.
But it's clear
the dynamics would have been different and Sutton would have faced a politically
more hostile Senate.
Sutton's temporary resignation after the
election avoided the hearing set for the Nov. 28 special session, when the
Senate membership was still 25 Republicans and 10 Democrats. Expulsion required
24 votes.
The connections and motivations are many in the Sutton
matter. We likely can never know how all the pieces came together. But what's
now obvious is none of this was as simple as it first sounded.
McMahon handled a sketchy set of sometimes-conflicting evidence
and witnesses professionally and skillfully, and perhaps as best someone could.
The Senate hearing, if nothing else, showed why a criminal charge wasn't
brought against the senator by the attorney general.
Questions
will always remain, especially the most important one of all: What really
happened in that motel room where Dennis Wiese let his son stay with their
former family friend and political rival?
Nothing? Accidental
touching? An unwanted sexual advance? The devious start of political blackmail?
The answer probably will take a death-bed confession. Until
then, South Dakota can only speculate about who lied.
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