Attorney General Holder blames prosecutorial misconduct.
During the corruption trial of former Alaska senator Ted Stevens, federal prosecutors were chastised by a judge for letting a witness leave town. They got in trouble for submitting erroneous evidence and were reprimanded for failing to turn over key witness statements. An FBI agent has since complained about the prosecution team's alleged misconduct.
Yesterday, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced that he had had enough. The Justice Department asked U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan to drop the case after learning that prosecutors had failed to turn over notes that contradicted testimony from their key witness.
The discovery by a fresh team of lawyers and their acknowledgment that the material should have been shared with Stevens's defense team led Holder, a former public corruption prosecutor, to conclude that the department's biggest public corruption case in a decade could not be salvaged.
Holder's decision invites tough new scrutiny of a unit that polices corrupt officials, and it could foreshadow a shakeup in the way the government prosecutes those crimes, according to lawyers who work on such cases.
If the government withholds evidence from the defendant, it violates the Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial. Steven's right to the due process of the law was ignored. One wonders if the defendant had not been an ex U.S. Senator if this would have been brought up. It's why its good to be able to afford effective lawyers. With that in mind, does this outcome make you more or less confident in the national criminal justice system?
