Sheryl Williams Stapleton, formerly the Democratic floor leader in New Mexico’s House of Representatives, was convicted in August of enriching herself by diverting state and federal education funds.

The story ran in New Mexico. It did not travel much further, which is the ordinary fate of state-level corruption in the United States and the reason the pattern underneath it is so rarely described.

Not an isolated case

The conviction is the latest in a run of public corruption cases involving New Mexico state legislators. Former state senator Phil Griego was sentenced to 18 months in prison in 2018 over his role in the sale of a historic state-owned building.

A string of cases in a single small legislature invites two readings, and they are the same two that apply to Taiwan’s legislature, or anywhere else prosecutions cluster. Either the institution has a problem, or the institution is being policed. A count of convictions cannot distinguish between them on its own.

What can help is looking at what the cases have in common. In New Mexico they mostly involve the intersection of legislative position and control over a stream of public money — education funds in Stapleton’s case, a state property transaction in Griego’s. That is a description of opportunity rather than of character, and opportunity is the thing institutional design can actually change.

The structural feature nobody mentions

New Mexico has one of the few unsalaried legislatures in the United States. Members receive per diem and mileage rather than a salary, and the legislature meets in short annual sessions.

Advocates of reform have argued for years that this arrangement guarantees legislators hold outside employment or business interests, and that outside interests plus lawmaking authority is the standing precondition for conflicts of interest. The counter-argument, made by defenders of the citizen-legislature model, is that professionalising a legislature creates a permanent political class with its own incentives, and that plenty of well-paid legislatures elsewhere have produced worse records.

Neither side can point to a clean natural experiment. But the argument is at least about a mechanism, which is more than most coverage of individual convictions offers.

Why state corruption goes uncovered

State capitols in the United States have lost more press coverage over the past two decades than almost any other beat. The reporters who once sat in Santa Fe, Springfield or Albany full-time have largely gone with the local newspapers that employed them.

The consequence is not only that fewer cases are reported. It is that fewer are found. Corruption prosecutions frequently begin with a journalist noticing an anomaly in a contract or a filing — the kind of work that requires someone reading state documents week after week without knowing whether there is a story in them.

Federal prosecutors and state attorneys general can and do act without press prompting. But the reporting supply and the prosecution supply are related, and one of them has been shrinking.

What follows

Sentencing has not yet been reported. Comparable cases in other states have produced widely varying outcomes — a former Chicago alderman received two years for bribery, a former Illinois House speaker seven and a half — which reflects the discretion judges hold in these cases and the weight they give to mitigating material.

We will follow the sentencing.

Related: Six Lawmakers, One Term, and a Story Nobody Exports.

Sources

Conviction and the record of prior New Mexico legislator cases reported by the Albuquerque Journal; comparative sentencing via Capitol News Illinois.