I don’t know Johnny Gaskins, the Raleigh criminal defense lawyer who faces as much as 35 years in prison for violating a federal law governing the way people handle their cash bank deposits. I’ve never met him, and my only tenuous connection to him is that a good friend of mine lives in Gaskins’ neighborhood.

All this is by way of saying I don’t have a dog in this fight. But reading this article in Sunday’s News & Observer about Gaskins sent a chill up my spine. The pertinent facts gleaned from the article are these:

(1) Gaskins specialized in defending murderers, lowlifes, drug dealers, etc. Naturally, that client roster didn’t endear him to cops and prosecutors.

(2) Many clients paid Gaskins in cash, and he let the cash pile up in a safe at his home.

(3) He declared the cash as income and paid taxes on it, as he was supposed to do.

(4) Gaskins had trust issues. When he finally decided to park his fat wad of cash in the bank, he divided it into relatively small amounts for deposit lest a criminally inclined teller figure out he was sitting on a hoard. (Yeah, that doesn’t make sense, but being irrational isn’t a crime — except, apparently, in federal court.)

(5) Under federal law, banks are required to report cash deposits of more than $10,000, in an effort to combat money laundering. As the N&O noted, “Purposely structuring cash deposits to cause a bank to evade reporting requirements is against the law.”

The article doesn’t indicate that Gaskins had a more nefarious intent, and that prosecutors nabbed him on a banking technicality only because that was the best case they could make (like putting Al Capone in prison for income tax evasion). This was the whole of their case: Gaskins earned his money legally, paid taxes on it, didn’t seek to launder it but was a little nutty about the way he handled it. Therefore he should go to prison.

I keep asking myself why a prosecutor would focus so relentlessly on the letter of the law and ignore its spirit. I keep coming back to (1) above. That’s what makes the chill run up my spine.