Thursday, 4:30 PM
Finneran to plead guilty, avoid jail
By Frank Phillips and Shelley Murphy, GLOBE STAFF
Former House speaker Thomas M. Finneran, in an agreement that will allow him to avoid jail time, will plead guilty Friday to obstruction of justice in exchange for federal prosecutors’ dropping perjury charges against him, according to two sources familiar with the deal.
Finneran, who faced 16 to 21 months in prison if convicted on all counts, will serve a term of unsupervised probation and pay a fine to end the long legal battle over charges that he misrepresented his role in the creation of a legislative redistricting map that diluted the clout of minority voters.
Finneran, 56, a lawyer and once-powerful figure on Beacon Hill, will enter his plea before US District Judge Richard G. Stearns. Finneran also has agreed not to seek political office for five years, and his case will be referred to the state Board of Bar Overseers for possible disbarment.
The plea agreement marks a turnabout for Finneran, who had insisted he was innocent and had declared he would not be "losing any sleep" over the federal case against him.
His trial was scheduled to begin Jan. 16.
Finneran, who has been president of the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council for two years, did not respond to several calls made to his office seeking comment. His attorney, Richard Egbert, declined to comment, as did Christina DiIorio Sterling, a spokeswoman for US Attorney Michael J. Sullivan’s office.
Officials at the Biotechnology Council could not be reached.
The criminal case stemmed from Finneran’s November 2003 testimony in a civil suit brought by the Black Political Caucus and other voting-rights groups that sought to overturn the House’s 2001 legislative redistricting plan on the grounds it was unfair to minority voters. A three-judge panel threw out the redistricting plan in 2004 and sharply scolded Finneran in a footnote to the decision, strongly implying that he had misled the court when he testified that he had little involvement in the drawing of the district lines.
Federal prosecutors indicted the former speaker in June 2005, and in the indictment outlined a series of eight meetings that he held about redistricting.
Finneran faced three counts of perjury and one count of obstruction of justice. The perjury charges stemmed from his testimony in court and in an earlier deposition in which he allegedly lied about his role. The obstruction of justice charge was brought against him because prosecutors said that, by making misleading statements, he had interfered with the judges’ efforts to determine whether the voting rights of minorities were violated.
Both charges are felonies, but obstruction of justice carries a maximum 10-year prison sentence and perjury carries five years.
At the time of the indictment, however, federal prosecutors said that under federal sentencing guidelines Finneran would have faced a sentence ranging from 16 to 21 months if he was convicted of all counts.
