Legal News

?Dismiss It!?; Senator Stevens Trial Suspended for Withheld Evidence

By Dan Slater

As we said yesterday, thank you notes can count for a lot. How much? For Senator Ted Stevens, who faces charges that he accepted and failed to report more than $250,000 in gifts, it may mean a mistrial.

Here’s what happened, according to Legal Times. Click here, also, for the Times story. Today, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan suspended the trial of Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, after it was revealed in court that prosecutors withheld FBI records that could have aided in Stevens’ defense, a.k.a., Brady material. The records in question, according to Legal Times, showed that the government’s star witness, former VECO CEO Bill Allen, who testified on Tuesday and Wednesday, told federal investigators that he believed Stevens would have paid for the renovations he is accused of omitting on his financial disclosure forms if the senator had received the invoices. Here’s another report from the WSJ. (This is the second evidentiary spat in the trial.)

The government waited until last night to hand the records over, which Brenda Morris, the lead prosecutor, imputed to “human error.”

“It strikes me that this was probably intentional. I find it unbelievable that this was just an error,” Judge Sullivan said. According to the WSJ, he also said: “Thank goodness we don’t have to rely on the United States to give [Stevens] a fair trial.”

At one point, lead defense attorney Brendan Sullivan reportedly turned to Morris and fumed, “Dismiss it!”

Morris conceded Stevens’ lawyers should have gotten the records sooner but declined to say who on her team made the error. She said the omission had caused no harm because Allen was still on the stand.

Sullivan scheduled a hearing at 4:30 p.m. today to determine how to proceed. Stay tuned.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on October 02, 2008 (boomark / email).