CRIME: Artful Dodger

Convicting ex-Congressman Andrew Jackson May of Kentucky was a speedy matter—it took a federal jury less than two hours to find him guilty of taking bribes from wartime Munitions Makers Henry & Murray Garsson and conspiring to defraud the U.S. (TIME, Feb. 3, 1947 et seq.). But getting Handy Andy to serve his prison sentence of eight months to two years was not so easy.

Last week, two years and four months after the conviction, after one unsuccessful appeal to the Circuit Court and two to the Supreme Court, Andy May was still at liberty. With his codefendants, the Garssons, he had cooked up one more dodge; they asked Washington’s District Court to reduce their sentences and let them go free on probation.

Old (74) Andy May’s lawyers pictured him as a sad and spavined man, plagued with a bad heart, failing eyesight and hearing, and the pangs of near-poverty. Andy’s lawyer pleaded that a prison term would bar him from ever holding public office or practicing law again in his native state. (His lawyers did not mention that May, despite his conviction, gets a lifetime federal pension of about $3,400 a year for his 16 years in Congress.) His doctor was even more persuasive. He told the court that a prison term might actually kill old Andy May.

“The public interest would be better served … by the granting of probation to an old and broken man,” said the appeal. The court gave the government a week to reply, and Andy May and the Garsson brothers had won at least one more postponement of their date with the warden.