Time to change South Carolina’s nickname, y’all. It’s The FacePalmetto State.*
According to federal authorities, James Metts, the state’s longest-serving sheriff and a tough-on-crime Republican who has held office since the Nixon era, was just indicted for allegedly taking bribes to fix undocumented immigrant cases at his Lexington County jail.
Who do the feds say slipped him the seedy cash? The owner of some Mexican restaurants, among others.
Here’s a run down of the indictment from The Associated Press:
Court documents say Metts allowed friends to buy favors, accepting cash in return for agreeing to assist people who were in the country illegally and who were being detained. The indictment detailed several phone calls between Metts and a former Lexington Town councilman, who was acting as a go-between for the owner of several Mexican restaurants. Metts accepted an envelope full of cash in exchange for keeping some of the restaurants’ employees from ending up in federal databases of immigrants who weren’t supposed to be in the U.S.
While pretty bad on its own, this is really just the latest in a sorry series of South Carolina sheriffs getting in trouble with the law.
According to Jeffrey Collins of The Associated Press, Metts is the eighth county sheriff to either face criminal investigations or be indicted since May 2010. South Carolina has 46 counties. So that’s 17.4 percent of all Palmetto State sheriffs in the past four years.
Seventeen-point-four percent. That’s the percentage Warren Buffet paid in taxes on his nearly $40 million taxable income in 2010. It’s how many people in Kentucky lived in poverty in 2011. It’s the amount of global web traffic generated by mobile devices. What it is not, is something to be proud of or make you want to answer your state phone saying “It’s a great day in South Carolina.”
But today’s news also reminded me of a story last year by the great South Carolina reporter John Monk. It came with this memorable headline:
SC sheriffs in trouble — ‘dropping like flies’
That was a year ago, when at the time five county sheriffs were in trouble for various things. Like using inmates to dig a pond in a sheriff’s backyard or work on his car, sheriffs taking kickbacks, giving contraband to inmates, or embezzling public funds.
Now this with Metts. Another South Carolina sheriff. Again.
Today there’s a front-page story I wrote for The Center for Public Integrity called “An Ethics Mess in South Carolina” that deals with some entirely separate matters in a state that in 2012 earned an ‘F’ in the State Integrity Investigation, which graded all 50 states on their risk for corruption.
Meanwhile, a public corruption trial involving officials at a public university is taking place this week in Columbia in which “FBI wiretaps played in open court … told a tale of powerful university insiders scheming to make money off their public positions.”
And that’s the backdrop against which this news falls today. Palm, meet face.
*With thanks to Wonkette’s Doktor Zoom for “the facepalmetto state” tag in a story yesterday about even more zaniness out of South Carolina.
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