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A former federal judge has been sentenced to 30 days in prison for drug-related crimes involving a stripper.
Jack Camp was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan to
the prison time, plus a year of probation and a $1,000 fine. Camp,
67, had asked Hogan to sentence him to probation and community
service. Prosecutors had said Camp should serve between 15 days and six months in prison.
"He disgraced his position and himself and denigrated his
office. I could not only give him a sentence of probation and spare
him confinement," Hogan said.
Camp resigned from the U.S. District Court in November after
pleading guilty to a felony drug charge and two misdemeanors.
Camp said in court documents filed in February that his
decades-long battle with depression and a bicycling accident in
2000 caused brain damage that led him to use drugs and start seeing the stripper. His attorneys said then "there is no punishment he will endure more painful than the guilt and shame he faces every
day of the rest of his life."
"I want you to know that there is no one but me to blame for
what happened," Camp told Hogan in prepared remarks. "I fully
accept responsibility for my actions and no one knows better than I
do the weight of the decision you have to make as to the
appropriate penalty."
He said the struggles don't excuse his conduct and apologized to
his supporters.
"I hope you will see fit to permit me to remain in my home and
in my community. I commit to you that I will not abuse that trust
and that I will work as hard as I can to justify it," he said. "I
hope you will remember my many years of service to our country and
to my community before these events ended my career last year."
Prosecutors countered that there's no denying Camp was a
community leader, a family man and a respected jurist before he
struck up the relationship with the stripper. But they said he owed
a debt to society for his conduct.
Camp, who is married with two adult children, is a Vietnam War
veteran who was appointed to the bench by Ronald Reagan in 1987.
After he started seeing the stripper, prosecutors say he soon began
paying her for sex and using drugs with her.
Over the next few months, the two used cocaine and other drugs
together at strip clubs and other places. In June, prosecutors said
he brought a semiautomatic handgun with him when he followed her to a suburban Atlanta home where she was buying drugs.
She became a government informant by October, when Camp was
arrested in a parking lot by federal agents after he gave the
stripper $160 for a drug deal. They also recovered two guns from
his front seat and discovered that he gave the stripper his $825
government-issued laptop computer.
As part of the plea agreement, he stepped down from the bench
and agreed to cooperate with authorities looking into any of the
cases he handled while he was being investigated.
He could have faced up to four years in federal prison, but
prosecutors and defense attorneys acknowledged he was going to
receive substantially less time.
"Every waking moment he deals with the knowledge that his
recent actions have irrevocably destroyed the reputation he
carefully crafted and painstakingly earned," his lawyers said in a
court filing. "He recognizes that he will live his remaining years
as a judge who broke the very law that he had sworn to uphold."
