Injustice

In October 2008, just before Alaska Senator Ted Stevens faced reelection, a Justice Department team convinced a jury that he had accepted and concealed about $90,000 worth of free home renovations. The Republican leadership at the time threw him under a bus -- candidate John McCain and Sarah Palin called on him to resign. [Source]

He subsequently lost the election by 3,000 votes.

Testimony from a hunting buddy of Stevens', an oil services company named Bill Allen, proved key to the prosecution. Though Stevens had sent two bills for Allen's services in the renovation, Allen said in the trial, "he was just covering his a**" and didn't really want to pay.

This week we found out that not only was Stevens innocent of any wrongdoing, four of the prosecutors and an FBI agent "forgot" Allen's conflicting earlier statements. According to a court-ordered report released March 15th, the "complete, simultaneous, and long-term failure by the entire prosecution team" was "extraordinary" and "strains credulity." [Source].

In fact, Allen said Stevens had overpaid. He just "forgot" that when he took the stand.

The prosecution team had known Stevens was an unreliable witness because of his flip-flopping testimony, but never shared that with the defense -- a key requirement. In addition, as Thursday's report reveals, Allen had suborned perjury by asking an underage prostitute to sign an affidavit falsely stating they'd never *ahem* broken the law.

Although "the evidence establishes this this misconduct was intentional," the prosecutors will probably not be criminally prosecuted. Still, they may get disbarred. [Source]

Within this group of prosecutors, though, who's to blame? Brenda Morris was brought in to lead the case just two days before the indictment in July 2008. She may have simply been negligent in leaving the trial team unsupervised. The report said junior members of the team Joseph Bottini and James Goeke were the ones who intentionally withheld key evidence from the defense. [Source]

In the end, I can't help but feel bad about the whole situation. Unfortunately, Stevens will never enjoy having his name cleared -- he died in a plane crash in 2010.