William C. Foreman could spend 50 years in state prison if he's convicted of stealing secrets from the Hoosier Lottery in an effort to rig a million-dollar scratch-off game.

But the former lottery security official's trial has been delayed so he can challenge the constitutionality of the nation's harshest penalty for breaching lottery security.

The state's top lottery official, Esther Q. Schneider, favors the stiff penalty to deter inside jobs that threaten public confidence in the Hoosier Lottery, which has been a cash cow for state government since 1989, generating nearly $10 billion in sales.

"They need to go for the throat," Schneider said.

Former Hoosier Lottery Director Jack Crawford says reaching for the throat goes too far when it comes to Indiana's law prohibiting disclosure of confidential lottery records for financial gain.

Crawford is the Indianapolis defense attorney representing Foreman, 60, a retired Indianapolis Police Department sergeant who resigned from the lottery in 2004 amid a criminal investigation.

"The law has to make sense, and this one doesn't," Crawford said. "Some forms of rape, child molesting and armed robbery are considered lesser offenses."

He has filed a motion in Marion Superior Court to dismiss the felony charge. Foreman is scheduled to go to trial March 20.

Marion Superior Court Judge Grant W. Hawkins has not yet ruled.

The Indiana attorney general's office and the Marion County prosecutor's office are opposing Crawford's effort to invalidate the law.

"The General Assembly has said this is so serious it needs to be an A felony," Marion County Prosecutor Carl Brizzi said. "If the public loses confidence in the lottery, there will be no lottery."  [Editor: Using the same logic, why don't they get rid of the computerized drawings?]

Nonetheless, Brizzi acknowledged even he was surprised to find the penalty was so severe when Foreman was charged in November 2004.

The game at issue is the continuing "$2,000,000 Bonus Spectacular," in which million-dollar scratch-off winners get a shot at another million-dollar prize at the end of the game. Tickets began selling for $20 each in January 2004, and the Hoosier Lottery says two million-dollar winning tickets have yet to be claimed.

In their brief to the court, Deputy Prosecutor Rom Byron and Deputy Attorney General Chad C. Duran say Foreman was a trusted lottery employee whose duties included monitoring Scientific Games, the Atlanta company that printed Indiana's lottery tickets.

Prosecutors say Foreman used his inside knowledge to direct two accomplices to a store in Cross Plains that had a winning ticket. There, they bought all of the tickets.

They have agreed to plead guilty and testify against Foreman, who Crawford says made "not a dime" from the alleged ticket scam.

The 20 to 50 years in prison Foreman faces is considerably more than the two to eight years a defendant in Indiana could expect if convicted of any other financial crime.

Crawford argues that, with the exception of unlawfully disclosing confidential lottery information, 50-year prison terms have been exclusively reserved in Indiana for the most violent crimes or serious drug crimes.