A federal appeals court in Chicago has upheld the nearly 5-year prison sentence of former state Rep. Luis Arroyo, who pleaded guilty to accepting bribes to promote gambling legislation.
In a ruling handed down Friday, the court rejected arguments from Arroyo that a lower court judge was wrong to say the long sentence was necessary to deter public corruption.
“We’ve rejected this argument before and do so again today,” the ruling stated. “The judge presumed that public officials are rational actors who pay attention when one of their own is sentenced. That presumption was reasonable.”
When U.S. District Judge Steven Seeger sentenced Arroyo last year, he said the former lawmaker had committed a “frontal assault on the very idea of representative government ... It’s gross. It was beneath you, it was beneath the state of Illinois.
“You were a dirty politician who was on the take,” the judge continued, calling Arroyo a “corruption super-spreader.”
Arroyo was accused of taking bribes from politically connected businessman James Weiss, who ran a company seeking to legalize unregulated gambling devices known as sweepstakes machines.
The son-in-law of former Cook County Assessor Joseph Berrios and husband of former state Rep. Toni Berrios, Weiss was found guilty last month for his role in bribing both Arroyo and former state Sen. Terry Link, as part of Weiss’ push for sweepstakes legislation.
Link, a government informant who pleaded guilty to federal tax evasion, secretly recorded Arroyo’s offer of $2,500 to Link for the senator’s help with the legislation. That offering was a downpayment on what Arroyo promised would be a monthly payment in that amount for a year.
As he was writing out the initial check from Weiss’ business’ for Link, Arroyo was recorded saying, “This is the jackpot.”
In his appeal, Arroyo argued that the judge failed to cite “empirical evidence” supporting the contention that a long sentence would deter other lawmakers from accepting bribes.
The appeals court responded that “bribery is a premeditated crime—those tempted to sell out the public have plenty of time to weigh the risks and rewards before doing so. The district judge did not err by reasonably presuming that public officials consider the criminal sentences of other politicians, and that a longer sentence for Arroyo was necessary to deter corruption at the margins.”
