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After the scandal with the prosecution of the Duke lacrosse players, you might think nothing would surprise you in a high-profile case. So I was shocked when U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder concluded prosecutors had acted so egregiously in the case against former Sen. Ted Stevens that his conviction on ethics charges should be vacated.
It was even more shocking to see that not only did Judge Emmet Sullivan accept Mr. Holder’s recommendation but that he also appointed a special prosecutor to investigate the six prosecutors who were involved because their acts were so out of bounds.
Judge Sullivan said he had never seen such misconduct as what had occurred in the Stevens case.
Stevens had been charged with lying on Senate disclosure forms to conceal improvements that had been done on a home he owned in Alaska. The work and materials had been arranged for by a close friend of Sen. Stevens, Bill Allen.
When Allen was first questioned in the Stevens investigation, he made statements that could have helped Stevens’ defense. The notes from this interview were never given to the Stevens defense team despite a legal requirement to do so, and Allen’s testimony at the trial conflicted substantially with what he had first told the investigators. These notes also revealed that Allen said he had no memory at all of a conversation with a friend of the senator, but at the trial he testified about that conversation in great detail.
Ted Stevens was one of the most powerful senators and a fixture in Alaskan politics for five decades. He was a driving force behind Alaska’s statehood. He served in the Senate from 1968 until this past January. Stevens ran for re-election last November, and even though he was convicted just before Election Day, Stevens lost by only 4,000 votes. Clearly, the prosecution cost Stevens his seat.
Stevens was the longest-serving Republican in Senate history. He was the former chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. He had a long and distinguished record.
Earlier this year, questions had already been raised about the Stevens prosecution. In February, Judge Sullivan held prosecutors in contempt for not providing other documents that could have aided Stevens’ defense.
Maybe Stevens did accept gifts from a longtime friend that he should not have taken. Certainly, he should have been more careful or more thorough on the disclosure forms. However, I am always troubled when an elected official running for re-election is indicted just a few months before Election Day. Stevens was confident he could prove his innocence and actually requested a speedy trial in an effort to clear his name before the voters went to the polls.
Eric Holder and Judge Sullivan should be applauded for the difficult decisions they made. Although he was not attorney general when this misconduct occurred, it is a serious embarrassment to Holder’s department, and it was appropriate that he decided that lawyers in the Justice Department had acted so wrongly that this conviction should be negated.
There is a lesson from this case that goes beyond Sen. Stevens. As we sadly learned in the Duke lacrosse case, prosecutors will break the rules to advance their own interests. In the Stevens case, prosecutors were willing to break the rules even when the accused was such a prominent figure. Their misconduct directly affected the political makeup of the U.S. Senate, which will affect every citizen in this country. It is an outrage. So when an elected official is indicted, please remember “innocent until proven guilty.”
This article was originally published in Long Island Business Journal, another Dolan Media publication.
