It’s the second Costanza of the week! (Pointer credit and thanks to JutGory)
First we had the Incredible Texting Judge, but this guy, Burnett County, Wisconsin assistant district attorney Daniel Steffen, 52, actually engaged in conduct similar (but worse) than what George was trying to wriggle out of in the immortal scene above from the Ethics Alarms movie and TV clip archive.
You’ll recall that he was called on the metaphorical carpet by his boss for having sex on his desk with a cleaning woman.
Steffen, however, topped George by secretly recorded himself having sex with three women, one of which he was in the process of prosecuting. In one of his recordings, the ADA can be heard promising leniency in exchange for sex, according to the criminal complaint. “While the defendant and Victim #1 are still engaged in sex, the defendant looks at the camera, sticks his tongue out, and winks several times,” and can be heard repeatedly telling the victim, “Who’s in charge?” the complaint says.
“Victim #1,” the woman whom Steffen was in the process of prosecuting, admitted to the sexual relations it after investigators revealed the existance of the recording on Steffen’s iPad. Steffen had given her his personal cell phone number, and he invited her to his home where they had sex several times. They also had sex in his office during work hours—just like George!
“Was that wrong?” Steffen may now ask, plaintively.
Uh, yeah, Dan. using your authority and power as a prosecutor to force women into having sex is very wrong. It perverts the course of justice, it is a sex crime, it undermines public faith in the criminal system, and it disgraces your (former) profession.
Steffen faced a maximum of 10 and a half years in prison, and should have been sentenced to all of them. Instead he only has to spend 18 months behind bars. Don’t ask me why: maybe the judge had secret tapes too.
Ethics Alarms 
He must have lacked political pull, or sufficient political pull to get him out of this completely. One judge here that I am aware of got caught having sex with a sheriff’s officer and was simply transferred out of the vicinage. Another judge was suspended for a period of time for being a little too forward with his law clerk, and a third was suspended for 3 months for getting drunk at a party he should never have been attending and playing grab-ass with the female attendees, then not renominated when the time came. Guess which of these three judges was the most politically powerful? Guess which the least? Of course it didn’t help that when the third judges time to be renominated came, there was a governor of the opposite political party in charge who engaged in what I can only describe as a judicial purge.
I don’t see the crime here? Hey, she was just “co-operating” with the D.A., in exchange for a lighter sentence. I’ve seen enough Law and Order episodes to know that this is how it works.
Co-operating could be, confessing, snitching or in this case, answering the D.A.’s repeated questioning – “Who’s in charge?”
Of course, I’m kidding. Kind of.
Sickening. This kind of thing happens in corrupt banana republics and totalitarian regimes. It should never happen in our Republic.