Apr 3, 2009
Siegelman & Stevens
I don't want to brag, but I do believe I was the first person online (7:02 am on April 1st) to suggest a connection between Attorney General Holder's decision to drop the indictment against Sen. Ted Stevens and the fate of former Alabama Governor Don Siegleman. Now The Associated Press is reporting that Siegelman's lawyer has written to Holder, suggesting he do the same for the former Governor.
And, by the way, Alaska Governor Palin has a point when she and other Alaska Republicans suggests a re-do of the U.S. Senate election won by Democrat Mark Begich. Since Stevens was the victim of prosecutorial misconduct by the Bush/Republican Department of Justice and lost the election by just a few thousand votes, shouldn't he be given another chance? There's probably no legal argument for a repeat of the election, but it would be fair.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
(This issue in a larger scope has also affected AL House of Representative member Sue Schmitz - whose conviction, according to many, was also politically motivated. Disturbingly, it bears the same finger print, insofar as it was also performed in much the same fashion by the same federal prosecutor... Alice Martin.)
ReplyDeleteOn April 1, 2009 New York attorney Scott Horton in an article entitled "Justice on Stevens" in his column "No Comment" appearing in Harper's Magazine wrote that "The misconduct by prosecutors in the Stevens case, bad as it was, is trivial compared to what went on in a number of other political prosecutions which have been profiled here – the Siegelman case, the prosecutions of Paul Minor and two Mississippi judges, and the prosecution of Cyril Wecht."
Horton's other article entitled "Public Indecency" published online in AmericanLawyer.com [http://www.law.com/jsp/tal/PubArticleTAL.jsp?id=1202429420566&Public_Indecency] that same day, makes some rather interesting, yet disturbing points about the larger picture of the Justice Department's division of Public Integrity, which apparently disintegrated into a division of political prosecution of Bush administration "enemies," in much the same manner as Nixon's infamous political "enemies list."
He wrote that "the U.S. Department of Justice's public integrity section... purpose was to go after corrupt politicians and judges and to help ensure the integrity of the electoral process... stood for the highest ethical standards in government, and... was supposed to put teeth in those standards."
"Federal judges in Washington, D.C., and Maine have questioned the section's ethics and motivations. A special prosecutor is investigating whether cases brought by the section were politically motivated. The section is stonewalling a House Judiciary Committee investigation into its handling of a series of politically charged cases. And U.S. Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia recently ridiculed "honest services fraud"-the legal theory that has emerged as the hallmark of public integrity corruption prosecutions.
"The whistle-blower's accusations in the Stevens case suggest a victory-at-all-costs attitude, which is difficult to reconcile with the section's ostensible purpose of upholding ethics. That attitude was also apparent in the case of former Alabama governor Don Siegelman, where the public integrity section suppressed another whistle-blower's claims of jury tampering and political manipulation. That information only became public in a House Judiciary Committee investigation in 2008.
"Equally troublesome are charges that public integrity cases were politically manipulated. Statistics show that, during the George W. Bush presidency, roughly six cases were opened involving Democrats for every one involving a Republican. A Justice Department probe into the 2006 sacking of nine U.S. attorneys, which was led by Inspector General Glenn Fine, concluded that there was substantial evidence of such manipulation, but because Karl Rove, Harriet Miers, and other Bush White House figures refused to cooperate, Fine could not conclude his investigation. A special prosecutor, Nora Dannehy, was appointed to pursue the matter.
"But in the end, Justice Scalia may have raised the most far-reaching questions about the section. Following criticism voiced by legal scholars, he questioned the heavy use of the honest services fraud statute. Honest services fraud involves a scheme that deprives a citizen of the "intangible right to honest services" of a person who holds a position of public trust. Almost anything that a prosecutor sees as corrupt can qualify. Scalia offers his own example: Suppose a public employee skips work and goes to a ball game. Is that person depriving the country of his honest services?"