The U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama told members of the U.S. Sentencing Com­mission that she is concerned about light sentences that the district’s judges are handing down in white-collar cases, The Birmingham News reported.

Joyce Vance (DOJ)

Joyce Vance said, according to The News, that the district’s judges usually use their discretion in sentencing wisely, but she said that lighter sentences in white-collar cases are “espe­cially troubling.”

Vance, who was sworn in to the job Aug. 27, appeared last Friday in Austin, Texas, at a regional public hearing of the Sentencing Com­mission. The panel is holding a series of hearings to mark the 25th anniversary of the Sentencing Re­form Act, which created the guidelines judges use in crafting sentences. “We have noticed an increasing number of below-guidelines sentences in white-collar cases,” Vance told the commission, according to the Birmingham newspaper.

She added: “A potential white-­collar thief could reasonably conclude that fraudulent conduct in the Northern District of Alabama is actu­ally cost-effective.” She said the 2005 Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. Booker — which made sentencing guidelines recommended, but not compulsory — might be having unintentional effects by establishing contradictory sentences, according to the newspaper.

Vance, in an interview with The News, cited a order by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals directing the district court for the Northern District of Alabama to re-sentence former HealthSouth executive Ken Livesay in an accounting fraud case. U.S. District Judge Karon Bowdre sentenced Livesay to five years’ probation in 2008 after the circuit court overturned two previous sentences of five years’ probation, The News said.

The district judge gave Livesay leeway because of time the former executive served during his original probation sentence, which he received in 2004, according to the newspaper.

“I believe Booker has made sentencing less uni­form and thus less predict­able for prosecutors and de­fendants alike,” Vance said in her testimony to the Sentencing Commission, according to The News.

The Justice Department opposes an appeal from former Alabama Democratic Gov.Don Siegelman for the Supreme Court to reconsider his 2006 conviction on corruption charges, the Associated Press reported yesterday.

Don Siegelman

Siegelman, who is out on bond pending his appeal, is asking the Supreme Court to review an earlier decision by a federal court in Alabama that let most of his conviction stand. Siegelman, who served as governor from 1999-2003, was sentenced in 2006 to seven years in a federal prison on bribery and mail fraud charges brought by Middle District of Alabama U.S. Attorney Leura Canary. Canary still serves in that post, as a holdover from the Bush administration, while the Obama administration works on getting its own nominee in place. Her then-counterpart in the Northern District of Alabama, Bush U.S. Attorney Alice Martin, also pursued charges against Siegelman, but was unsuccessful.

Members of Congress and 44 former state attorneys general have questioned the conviction, which many critics have claimed was the politically motivated work of then-Bush aide Karl Rove and other Republican officials. We reported last month that the Justice Department Office of Special Counsel found no evidence to support a whistleblower’s claims that the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Middle District of Alabama acted inappropriately in the prosecution of the former governor and his co-defendant, former HealthSouth Corp. CEO Richard Scrushy, who is serving a sentence of almost seven years arising from the 2006 conviction.

Siegelman and Scrushy have maintained their innocence. Their attorneys have argued that donations the health care business executive made to the then-governor’s lottery fund and Scrushy’s later appointment to the Alabama health board wasn’t criminal, just ordinary politics.

DOJ recommended that the Supreme Court not hear the appeal, court papers filed Friday night said, according to the AP.

“Under a standard that requires not just a quid pro quo, but one that is verbally spelled out with all ‘i’s dotted and ‘t’s crossed, all but the most careless public officials will be able to avoid criminal liability for exchanging official action for campaign contributions,” the DOJ argued, according to the AP.

Federal prosecutors are calling for a 20 year sentence for former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, according to a letter from the prosecutors and obtained by The Associated Press.

Siegelman was sentenced in June 2006 to seven years in federal prison on corruption charges, but is out on bond pending an appeal. We previously reported that he wants the full 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to review an earlier decision by a smaller three-judge panel that let his conviction stand.

Alabama U.S. Attorneys Leura Canary and Alice Martin brought bribery and mail fraud charges against Siegelman in 2005, but the AP reported that Canary has since excused herself from the case. Members of Congress and 44 former U.S. Attorneys have questioned the conviction, which many critics have claimed is the politically-motivated work of then-Bush aide Karl Rove among other Republican officials.

“It’s evident that this team of prosecutors are biased and hell-bent to uphold this conviction and try to punish me as much as they can,“ Siegelman told AP about this latest move.

The Justice Department would not comment on the letter, AP said.