Guilty as charged
Muncie City Council member Monte Murphy was caught red handed with absentee ballots by a Delaware County jury Thursday night. Now it's up to Special Judge Dean Young of Blackford County to decide whether Murphy, also a Muncie firefighter, gets time for the three felony counts of receiving a ballot. Each felony carries a standard 18 months in prison.
The jury spent plenty of time deliberating that Murphy was guilty of three of five counts that involved Henrietta Williams who said she gave Murphy her ballot to mail and Sylvester Turner Jr., and his ex-wife, Kathy, who claimed they were threatened by authorities to implicate Murphy in the 2007 ballot scandal. Murphy did not take the stand in his defense and his defense lawyer John Brooke never called a witness.
Ian McLean, a deputy attorney general, said witnesses initially gave one story about Murphy handling absentee ballots and then gave another on the witness stand. Brooke acknowledged Murphy mailed a ballot for Williams at her request, but he never tampered with any ballot. The verdict was a big victory for the Indiana Attorney General's office that prosecutes voter fraud and local Republicans who have long accused Democrat Murphy and his family of voter fraud when it comes to absentee ballots.
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If in fact he has been
If in fact he has been tried and convicted, then it is time to pay up or put up. In this case the council job should be gone and barring take place, even if it is "ever" reduced later to a misdemeanor. If that is there is New Evidence introduced to warrant mitigating an extenuating circumstances that a Judge and jury could expect to hear that would change his conviction.
This should not even be a question by this point and time; we should be reading about who has been chosen to replace him and that the judge has determined some kind of time to serve or public service to be done.
Randall L. Jacobsen Sr.
Chaplain, M
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