The Pew Charitable Trusts

Former North Carolina governor Mike Easley ended long-running state and federal investigations into his tenure on Tuesday (Nov. 23) by pleading guilty to the lowest-level felony on the state's books: accepting a campaign gift without reporting it. Easley, a Democrat who served from 2001 to 2009, acknowledged that he took a $1,600 helicopter ride with a political supporter in October 2006 without disclosing it, as required by state law.

Though the crime sounds relatively minor and will not land the former governor behind bars because of the terms of his plea deal, it does have repercussions — most importantly, on Easley's reputation. "Any good he did as governor is overshadowed by this," Gary Pearce, a Democratic consultant, tells the (Raleigh) News & Observer . "[F]rom now on, whenever someone writes about him, or when his obituary is written some day, the first phrase following the comma after his name will be, 'the first governor convicted of a felony.'"

Easley portrayed the charge on which he was convicted as "little more than a paperwork error," according to The Associated Press . But the AP notes that the state and federal investigations into Easley's actions, probes which began shortly after he left office, "devoured time and resources, with investigators taking hundreds of interviews and looking into everything from his wife's job at North Carolina State University to a coastal subdivision where the Easleys purchased a lot."