I’m not familiar with the case but NBC News said the prosecutors were under investigation.
Why, though?
Because he’s a million years old, out of office, and prosecutors already had their chance.
So, does it look like Stevens was really, for real innocent? Or is this merely a procedural technicality? (I’m not saying that a procedural technicality is okay, I’m just wondering if Stevens was railroaded)
I think the deal is that he did some seriously bad stuff (mostly related to money), but some of the charges against him were exaggerated, and the prosecution fucked up badly. It’s kind of a technicality, but (I think) almost on the level of Miranda: what the prosecution did was Not Okay[sup]TM[/sup].
It makes it look like he was for real innocent. And yes it matters. Corruption needs to be decried, especially in the Courts. This isn’t about party. Rostenkowski did time for his thievery. If the DOJ thinks that Stephens is not guilty because evidence was withheld, then they should say so so that he can have his reputation back.
The same thing is happening to Tom Delay. They charged him and have never brought it to trial. Now he hasn’t complained about that, but neither has the prosecutor as far as I can see. Even if Delay doesn’t want a speedy trial, the People are entitled to it too. It just looks like a political vendetta if it doesn’t go to trial. (Unless I missed it.) I loathe the politics of Stephens and Delay, but trumping up charges and ruining their lives is a gross form of corruption. Is that what happened?
The power of a prosecutor to destroy someone’s life with charges that they must spend all their life savings defending and still having members of the public argue they were guilty when there was no conviction is a despicable abuse of power. Whether it’s the Texas prosecutor in the Delay case, the Stephens case or Ken Starr in his political persecution of Bill Clinton. All of those prosecutions look corrupt to me.
Could be another Duke university style slap-down of a prosecuter.
There is a difference between plain incompetence and manufacturing evidence, which is what the Duke guy was doing. Nifong. He was disbarred.
The Stevens prosecutors were at minimum incompetent, and probably withholding evidence that the defense may have found very useful. We really won’t know. Stevens has the high profile and the money and the power and the incentive to fight it very, very hard. But hundreds of thousands of prosecutions go on in this country every year against defendants who cannot fight it. Nor could the system afford to have every defendant fight hard. But that puts an extraordinary amount of trust in the prosecutors to do their job ethically and honorably. A criminal defendant gets a lot more justice if he/she is rich. Like the Nifong case, like the Stevens case. Like the Michael Jackson case. A working stiff who is charged pretty much has to accept a plea, or go to trial with his lawyer only having put in a a forthieth the preparation time a rich person’s lawyer. The not rich have to take plea bargains or bankrupt their families to try to prove their innocence. It is not the judge or jury who stands between an innocent man and prison, and it isn’t really the defense lawyer if the prosecutor is hell bent on conviction. It is the prosecutor who we trust to be honest, diligent and fair as a practical matter.
I’ve noted this case in another thread, but it bears repeating here. DA: Prosecutor Ben Field to remain on job while appealing suspension – The Mercury News and specifics of the four contested misuses of power here: http://209.85.173.132/search?q=cache:IoWa1ap3ywYJ:www.bayareanewsgroup.com/multimedia/mn/news/archive/justice/JUSTICEAugusteN.pdf+benjamin+field+prosecutor&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a
Still, this is excellent news for the McCain campaign!
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He’s 85. Bernie Madoff was 70, and they put him in prison. At what point during those extra 15 years are you allowed to commit crimes without fear of going to prison.
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All being out of office means is that he’s not in a position to commit future crimes like the ones he was accused of. He still bears legal responsibility for whatever crimes he may have committed when he was in office.
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Jeopardy doesn’t attach. The prosecutors can legally retry him.
As I said, he’s a million years old, he’s out of office, and they had their chance.
I saw that. What are your grounds for arguing that those reasons are enough to keep him from being recharged?
What are your grounds that they aren’t, especially if he isn’t, in fact, charged again?
The Obama people don’t get it. The Justice Department is supposed to be a political arm of the president and further his power. Justice has nothing to do with it. When will they ever learn?
Stevens committed crimes…especially serious crimes, because he betrayed the public trust by commiting crimes that abused his power as a public servant. It therefore becomes incumbent on the government to ensure that a public figure who so abuses his office and betrays his constiuents be convicted and punished. If it doesn’t, it turns a blind eye to justice and makes it more likely that other elected officials will follow Stevens’ bad example, and American democracy will suffer.
Now that he has been cleared, Stevens can run for Governor of Alaska in 2010, when he will be only 88, against that young and perky upstart, Sarah Palin.
I got the opposite impression. It sounded as though the AG is going to really go after the clowns who screwed up the first prosecution, but that he felt that they had so tainted the material that he could not fairly initiate a new trial with the level of government corruption that had already damaged the case.
That’s a first impression of the stories I heard on the news, today, and I do not know how it will look as the story develops over the next few weeks.
In which case prosecutions of the prosecutors may be in order depending on what they did.
Oh, I’d say there’s enough evidence that the Bush Justice Department was run like a barrel of monkeys that there’s reason to believe that misconduct like this wouldn’t have happened under a more professional Department like the one we had for the previous 200 years. At least not in so high-profile a case. But I do agree that the sins of commission here were those of the career prosecutors, not the politicals.
–Cliffy
Well it’s certainly the one which dominated all the coverage of the trial.
I don’t know if that’s true, but it makes no difference if it is.
Stevens thought he was innocent, so he naturally expected an innocent verdict, and under those circumstances it made sense to move it up. He lost because the prosecution was consistently corrupt. (It’s important to remember that this latest revalation is one of a series of such actions by the prosecution.)
What you’re saying seems logically analogous to a robber saying “my attempt to rob your house wouldn’t have been successful had you had better locks, so stop whining”.