WASHINGTON (Legal Newsline) - President Joe Biden commuted the sentence of Zach Scruggs, the son of legendary Mississippi lawyer Dickie Scruggs who sat at the center of a group of trial lawyers and politicians who worked with Biden’s brother Jim and helped propel the President’s career in Congress.
The clemency came in a slug of 1499 pardons and commutations Biden issued Dec. 12.
Zach and his father Dickie were caught up in a scheme to bribe a judge in Mississippi. Zach pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of failing to report the scheme, while Dickie was sentenced to seven years in prison.
The bribery scandal came after Scruggs won an estimated $1 billion in fees for his role in negotiating the $260 billion national tobacco settlement between states and cigarette manufacturers in 1998.
Dickie Scruggs and his colleagues had a long association with the Biden family, according to “The Fall of the House of Zeus,” by journalist Curtis Wilkie. Scruggs paid Jim Biden’s consulting firm $100,000 to promote an ultimately failed bill in Congress to approve a $368 billion tobacco settlement with billions in fees for Scruggs and other private lawyers.
Joe Biden sat on the Judiciary Committee at the time.
Zach Scruggs sought to have his guilty plea overturned but failed. He served a short sentence in prison for hiding his knowledge of the bribery scheme. Dickie Scruggs served several years in prison and has since returned to his prominent position in Oxford, Miss., home of his alma mater Ole Miss. Zach is executive director of Second Chance Mississippi. Both men were disbarred.
“I still feel bad about getting Zach tangled up in everything,” Scruggs said in a 2017 interview. “He didn’t deserve that.”