CHICAGO AP – Sen. Roland Burris is pleading with ordinary Illinoisans to stop a “rush to judgment” amid growing fury over the new senator’s shifting accounts of how he came to be appointed to the Senate.

“If I had done the things I’ve been accused of, I would be too embarrassed to stand up here in front of you because you all are my friends,” Burris said Wednesday at a City Club of Chicago luncheon, adding that during his decades of public service there was “never a hint of a scandal.”