Don’t forget what human frailty is

U.S. District Judge Harry Leinenweber said he wasn’t feeling well last week, and put off until February the sentencing of the “ComEd Four,” caught up in the investigation of Michael Madigan and convicted of bribery last May.

Reminding me of something I’ve been meaning to do: put in a good word for one of the guilty parties, Jay Doherty. I’ve known Jay for 25 years, since I started attending the Friday lunches at Gene and Georgetti that our ace political columnist, Steve Neal, held in an upstairs room. The meals were well-lubricated, hours-long affairs, with politicians and power brokers. I always tried to sit next to the former chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Dan Rostenkowski, and listen fascinated to his tales of backroom deals in Congress. He had a way of giving your forearm a squeeze — I liked to think of that squeeze as passing from Lyndon B. Johnson to Dan to me.

Rostenkowski went to prison over trifles. Misuse of postage stamps. Crystal. Some chairs he took home. Petty stuff. What I call “lone trombonist” crimes. The marching band executes a crisp 90-degree turn, but one guy misses his cue and keeps going straight. His friends wince.

Jay isn’t a friend — I haven’t spoken to him in years — though I did send him a supportive note when his legal woes began. Because I know how lonely it can get when trouble comes knocking. Rather, he was what we in the news biz call “a source.” When the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District was feuding with a Gold Coast condo over use of an alley, the story reached me through Jay, who “dropped a dime” on them, as we old timers say.

“Let’s have some fun,” he’d said. And fun it was. I was a better informed journalist because of Jay Doherty, and a plugged-in reporter is a happy reporter.

Guys like Jay thought they were smart, gigging the system. That was the challenge — to play by the rules, bending them until they shrieked perhaps, but not to break them. And operators like Jay were smart, mostly. Until they weren’t.

“I play the long game,” Jay says on the FBI tape. “I love the game.”

I can vouch for that. Jay loved being on the inside, and sharing his perspective with guys like me. Nor am I untarnished. If prosecutors someday decide to go after people whom Jay Doherty bought a steak lunch in 2004, then I might be in the dock too, and wish somebody would speak up for my good name, assuming I have one, which might be a stretch at this point.

I’ve never heard an ill word about Jay Doherty. I know him to be a loving husband and father — my wife and I attended the birthday party for his daughter, born with Down syndrome, a pool party one long-ago bright summer day at a South Side country club. He supported good causes, like Misericordia.

Sun-Times file photo

For many years Jay was a genial, energetic host of the City Club, building that organization into a vital part of city life. He was proud of Chicago, proud of bringing in unexpected voices — including mine — of gathering people in a room to talk about the city’s problems. He didn’t invent the swamp in Springfield, nor did he do what he did eagerly.

“Mike Madigan’s not my best friend,” Jay says at one point on the tapes, referring to the former longtime speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives.

What Madigan was, I believe, is what lawyers call “an attractive nuisance.” Like a gaping hole in the sidewalk. Jay fell in, trying to navigate his path through a murky system. Careless, even criminal — obviously, based on the jury’s verdict, which I don’t dispute. What I do question is whether his is a crime that should put a man behind bars. Jay Doherty is a porpoise that blindly swam into the investigative net cast for Madigan and became entangled. The compassionate thing to do now would be to cut him free.

I hope Judge Leinenweber remembers the words of a predecessor, Thomas Noon Talfourd, an English judge, who said something about their shared profession that I believe applies: “Fill the seats of justice with good men, not so absolute in goodness as to forget what human frailty is.” When sentencing Jay Doherty, the judge should keep in mind the tendency of everyone to fall short of the ideal, and not impose upon Jay punishment beyond that merited by his very real, but very human failings.