Source: The BLT: Blog of the Legal Times
Mark Scarcella
April 28, 2009
Addressing a group of chief judges of federal district courts last week, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. vowed the Justice Department will take seriously failures of prosecutors to perform their duties, according to a judge who participated in the conference.
Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Wolf of Massachusetts, who has pressed the Justice Department to be more aggressive in confronting allegations of attorney misconduct, wrote Holder on April 23 “with a renewed hope” that he will tackle misbehavior. Wolf’s letter was disclosed today in a mob racketeering case in Boston in which Wolf cited a prosecutor for misconduct.Wolf wrote that former Attorneys General Alberto Gonzales and Michael Mukasey did not respond to letters in recent years concerning allegations of misconduct in criminal cases in Massachusetts. In his letter to Holder, Wolf thanked him for his remarks to the chief judges.“We appreciate your determination to assure that Department of Justice attorneys perform their duties honorably and ably, and to take seriously any failure to do so,” Wolf wrote in the five-page letter. Holder had asked the judges, Wolf said in the letter, to report to him directly when the judges encounter a problem.
Wolf noted the recent decision of U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate allegations of misconduct in the Ted Stevens case in the District of Columbia. The special counsel is investigating whether six prosecutors deliberately violated court orders and rules in the Stevens case. At Holder’s request, the judge tossed Stevens’ conviction earlier this month.
Sullivan’s action in the Stevens case, Wolf wrote in the letter, “confirms that other judges share my concern” about prosecution misconduct. “As the Stevens case also indicates, prosecutorial misconduct is neither a rare nor merely historical problem,” Wolf wrote.
http://legaltimes.typepad.com/blt/2009/04/holder-to-district-judges-doj-will-confront-misconduct.html
Showing posts with label Eric Holder. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Eric Holder. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Friday, April 3, 2009
Mr. Holder and the Ted Stevens Case--Editorial
Source: The New York Times, nytimes.com
April 3, 2009
For eight years the Bush Justice Department cynically put politics and ideology above the law. So it is gratifying to see how Attorney General Eric Holder is handling the case against Ted Stevens, the former Alaska senator who was convicted last year on seven felony counts of ethics violations.
Mr. Holder announced this week that he would ask a judge to drop all charges against Mr. Stevens, a Republican, because of prosecutorial misconduct. Mr. Holder should ensure that the Justice Department gets to the bottom of what went wrong and subject other cases that have raised red flags to similar scrutiny.
Mr. Stevens was convicted of making false statements on Senate disclosure forms to hide an estimated $250,000 in home renovations and gifts, many from Bill Allen, an old friend with close ties to his state’s oil industry. The Justice Department says that prosecutors failed to turn over to the defense notes from an interview with Mr. Allen, a prime witness in the case, which conflicted with parts of his trial testimony.
Prosecutors are legally required to turn over evidence in their possession that would help a defendant prove his innocence. This revelation is only the latest in a series of instances in which Mr. Stevens’s prosecutors appear to have acted wrongly.
The prosecutors’ bad acts do not necessarily mean that Mr. Stevens was innocent of misusing his office. But in light of the prosecutorial wrongdoing, and the fact that Mr. Stevens lost his Senate seat last November, Mr. Holder was right not to choose to retry the case.
Mr. Holder, whose department is continuing to investigate the Stevens prosecution, now needs to determine whether the prosecutors’ conduct was so egregious that they should face their own ethics charges.
He should not stop with this case. Don Siegelman, the former governor of Alabama, and Paul Minor, a prominent Mississippi trial lawyer, have charged that Justice Department prosecutors engaged in unethical behavior in cases that led to their convictions. Both men claim that they were singled out for prosecution because of their affiliation with the Democratic Party.
Given the flagrant partisanship of the Bush Justice Department, it is especially reassuring to see Mr. Holder ignore party lines to do the right thing by Mr. Stevens. It has been far too long since the attorney general seemed interested in enforcing ethics and nonpartisanship in a department that has been shockingly lacking in both.
April 3, 2009
For eight years the Bush Justice Department cynically put politics and ideology above the law. So it is gratifying to see how Attorney General Eric Holder is handling the case against Ted Stevens, the former Alaska senator who was convicted last year on seven felony counts of ethics violations.
Mr. Holder announced this week that he would ask a judge to drop all charges against Mr. Stevens, a Republican, because of prosecutorial misconduct. Mr. Holder should ensure that the Justice Department gets to the bottom of what went wrong and subject other cases that have raised red flags to similar scrutiny.
Mr. Stevens was convicted of making false statements on Senate disclosure forms to hide an estimated $250,000 in home renovations and gifts, many from Bill Allen, an old friend with close ties to his state’s oil industry. The Justice Department says that prosecutors failed to turn over to the defense notes from an interview with Mr. Allen, a prime witness in the case, which conflicted with parts of his trial testimony.
Prosecutors are legally required to turn over evidence in their possession that would help a defendant prove his innocence. This revelation is only the latest in a series of instances in which Mr. Stevens’s prosecutors appear to have acted wrongly.
The prosecutors’ bad acts do not necessarily mean that Mr. Stevens was innocent of misusing his office. But in light of the prosecutorial wrongdoing, and the fact that Mr. Stevens lost his Senate seat last November, Mr. Holder was right not to choose to retry the case.
Mr. Holder, whose department is continuing to investigate the Stevens prosecution, now needs to determine whether the prosecutors’ conduct was so egregious that they should face their own ethics charges.
He should not stop with this case. Don Siegelman, the former governor of Alabama, and Paul Minor, a prominent Mississippi trial lawyer, have charged that Justice Department prosecutors engaged in unethical behavior in cases that led to their convictions. Both men claim that they were singled out for prosecution because of their affiliation with the Democratic Party.
Given the flagrant partisanship of the Bush Justice Department, it is especially reassuring to see Mr. Holder ignore party lines to do the right thing by Mr. Stevens. It has been far too long since the attorney general seemed interested in enforcing ethics and nonpartisanship in a department that has been shockingly lacking in both.
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