CHICAGO — With 10 days until former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan is scheduled to report to federal prison, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday denied the longtime Democratic power broker’s bid to remain free while he challenges his corruption conviction.
Without extraordinary intervention from the U.S. Supreme Court, Madigan’s hopes for staying out of prison are slim as he prepares to surrender on Oct. 13.
The former speaker was convicted in February on 10 federal corruption charges — including bribery — after a lengthy trial in which he was accused of trading legislative action for jobs and contracts for his allies along with introductions to potential clients for his property tax appeal law firm.
The Chicago-based appellate judges did not sign their order or explain their ruling Friday, but it affirms the decision from Madigan’s trial judge in August, who wrote that the ex-speaker’s “entire motion rides on routine, and meritless” objections and had “not come close” to meeting the “high burden” he’d need to argue to stay out of prison.
Read more: Judge denies ex-Speaker Madigan’s request to remain out of prison during appeal
“As such, he clings to false hope,” U.S. District Judge John Blakey wrote.
Blakey sentenced Madigan to 7 ½ years in a June hearing during which the judge ruled the former speaker had committed perjury when he made the risky decision to testify in his own defense as the trial drew to a close.
“The defendant’s testimony was littered with obstruction of justice and it was hard to watch,” Blakey said at Madigan’s June 13 sentencing. “To put it bluntly, it was a nauseating display. … You lied, sir. You lied. You did not have to.”
Read more: Madigan guilty of bribery as split verdict punctuates ex-speaker’s fall | Ex-Speaker Madigan sentenced to 7 ½ years in prison for bribery, corruption
After Blakey’s ruling denying bond in August, Madigan’s new appellate attorneys argued to the 7th Circuit that the judge’s ruling set an unreasonably high standard under which almost “no defendant could obtain release pending appeal.”
“In complex fraud and corruption cases like this one, courts routinely grant release,” the lawyers wrote in a brief last month.
The 83-year-old former speaker will be pushing 90 by the time his sentence is through, unless he wins on appeal.
Madigan spent handsomely on defense attorneys dating back to before he was even charged, including an expensive trial team that won him acquittals on seven of his 23 corruption charges, while the jury deadlocked on another six counts. But the former speaker, whose $40 million net worth was revealed in legal back-and-forth prior to sentencing, is not done shelling out for court battles.
This summer, Madigan hired a high-profile team of lawyers to handle his appeal, including Lisa Blatt, who holds the record for the woman with the most cases argued — more than 50 — in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. Blatt’s win rate is equally remarkable, including successfully arguing for a Northwest Indiana mayor whose corruption case spurred the high court’s conservative majority to narrow the federal bribery statute in a 2024 decision.
Lawyers for Madigan and those separately convicted of bribing him have leaned heavily on that ruling, which stipulates an after-the-fact “gratuity” is not the same as a bribe agreed on before an elected politician performs an “official act.” And earlier this year, a federal judge threw out the majority of bribery convictions for the so-called ComEd Four, a group of ex-lobbyists and executives for electric utility Commonwealth Edison who were found guilty after their own Madigan-related trial in 2023.
The judge ruled that while there was evidence of bribery between the ComEd defendants and Madigan, there was enough reasonable doubt to grant a new trial because it wasn’t clear that the jury would have reached the same verdict if given instructions more in line with the Supreme Court’s decision last year.
But there will be no retrial; the ComEd Four were finally sentenced this summer on their remaining conspiracy and wire fraud convictions, and the bribery counts were dismissed.
Read more: ‘You preferred secrecy and lies’: Madigan confidant gets 2 years for role in ComEd bribery scheme | Former ComEd CEO sentenced to 2 years for bribery scheme targeted at Madigan | John Hooker, first of ‘ComEd Four’ to be sentenced, gets 1½ years in prison | Longtime ComEd lobbyist gets 1 year in prison for role in Madigan bribery scheme
Blatt and her colleagues have another month to file arguments in Madigan’s larger appeal, but they’ve already previewed their fight against prosecutors’ use of a “stream-of-benefits" theory of bribery where they were not required to prove a smoking-gun handshake moment, but rather tried to convince the jury of a pattern of benefits over eight years.
And they’ll also try to push for the U.S. Supreme Court to define the meaning of “corruptly,” which was discussed during Blatt’s 2024 oral arguments but not conclusively addressed in the court’s decision. Even so, Madigan’s attorneys tried to plant doubt about the prosecutors’ use of the word — and their clients’ intent — during closing arguments in January.
The federal Bureau of Prisons has not yet assigned the former speaker to a correctional facility, but his attorneys requested he serve out his sentence at a prison camp in Terre Haute, Indiana.
If that ask is granted, Madigan will join former ComEd lobbyist Jay Doherty, who reported to the Terre Haute Federal Corrections Institution earlier this week. Doherty was sentenced to a year in prison for his role funneling money to Madigan allies through his longtime ComEd contract.
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