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Legal News

: Lawbeat

Weak explanation of Stevens defense

By Mark Obbie

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One of the great challenges of writing about the law is fitting cogent explanations into tight spaces without repelling lay readers with overly technical explanations (actually, that sounds like several challenges wrapped in one, but you take my point). The Wall Street Journal's Brent Kendall errs on the side of brevity today in this story about what he calls a "flurry of pretrial motions that challenged the government's public-corruption case" against Sen. Ted Stevens. Kendall uses about 150 of his allotted 416 words to detail those motions:

Sen. Stevens' legal team made three arguments on why the government's case should be thrown out.In one motion, his lawyers said the government's case improperly intruded on the Senate's domain and violated separation-of-powers principles. In another, the lawyers said the government's indictment was unconstitutionally vague because it lacked proper details about the gifts Sen. Stevens' allegedly received and concealed.Sen. Stevens' legal team also argued the government's case violated the Constitution's Speech and Debate Clause because Sen. Stevens was being prosecuted for legally protected legislative acts.In other motions, Sen. Stevens' lawyers asked the government to be more specific about certain charges, and they said some of the language in the indictment was prejudicial and inflammatory.

The lawyers also suggested that Sen. Stevens may seek to suppress some of the government's electronic-surveillance evidence. According to Sen. Stevens' legal filings, the government has 450 hours of telephone intercepts.

He saves many of the remaining words for background on the case and for the government's responses. So we sympathize with Kendall's plight. But, with real explanations lacking, how is a reader to appreciate, much less understand, the arguments? How does the case raise these constitutional issues? And what are those issues exactly? What difference does it make if an indictment is "prejudicial and inflammatory"? What does it mean -- legally, and factually in the context of this case -- to suppress electronic-surveillance evidence? Kendall would have been better off being less specific so that he could use the space to characterize the arguments, rather than try superficially to list them.

Full post as published by Lawbeat on August 15, 2008 (boomark / email).