Former HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy and former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman aren't going away quietly as they await sentencing Tuesday for their convictions in federal court last year on bribery, conspiracy and mail fraud charges related to Medicare billing.
A defiant Scrushy told MyFoxAL.com that he is certain to win a reprieve from the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals as soon as the truth is allowed to come out.
"It's wrong, it's absolutely wrong, it stinks every way you could look at it. There's no evidence, there's no reason why we should be in this situation. I don't care if you like Siegelman or you like me or you do or you don't. It doesn't matter. We're citizens and we have rights just like anybody else. Our constitutional rights were taken away from us. This is wrong," Scrushy said.
Click here to view the raw footage of interviews with Richard Scrushy and Don Seligman on MyFoxAL.com.
Last June, Scrushy and Siegelman were convicted of arranging $500,000 in contributions to Siegelman's campaign for a statewide lottery in exchange for being appointed by Siegelman to a seat on an influential hospital regulatory board. Both men deny trading government favors for campaign donations and claim a political vendetta is responsible for a miscarriage of justice. They have remained free on $250,000 bonds pending while their attorneys filed dismissal arguments.
Scrushy, an ordained minister who grew his chain of rehabilitation clinics into one of the largest in the country, said he is putting his faith in God to guide the judge to do the right thing at the sentencing.
"Our faith is strong, and we know that we're going to be victors in this and the truth is going to come out one day. And the question is how much suffering do I have to go through before the truth is revealed?" he asked. "God won't dish out anything that we can't handle. We can bear whatever he puts out. I mean, you know, our savior was nailed to a cross and he didn't do anything wrong."
In a separate interview, Siegelman, a Democrat, said that two ringers on the jury subverted his right to a fair trial and convinced the other jurors to convict him.
"We live in the best country in the world. We've got the greatest judicial system in the world. We know now that it's flawed," Siegelman told MyFoxAL.com last week. "The jury was corrupted by those two jurors e-mailing other jurors asking them to join them and convict me.
"The fact that the Department of Justice refused to investigate those e-mails speaks louder than anything I can say about their wanting those convictions to remain," Siegelman added.
Siegelman, who was also convicted of obstructing justice, has consistently claimed that White House aide Karl Rove is responsible for the investigation that led to his prosecution. Seigrelman said that he will be the first public official in history to be sentenced for something that has never been a crime.
"It is not a crime for someone to make a contribution, and in this case, to a lottery campaign," he said. "The United States Congress is going to find out about Karl Rove and we will watch as those officials raise their hands and testify about how he has abused the Department of Justice for the political use of the Republican Party, his wing of the Republican Party."
Get all the stories you need-to-know from the most powerful name in news delivered first thing every morning to your inbox