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: Lawbeat

Picking through shards after Stevens case collapse

By Mark Obbie

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Last week, in praising a Legal Times story on the Department of Justice's screwups in the Ted Stevens prosecution, I wondered which reporter would ask the next logical question: To what extent was Stevens truly exonerated (because the allegations against him went unproven)? Neil Lewis of the Times provides the first story I've seen of that sort, and the results are unimpressive.He frames (pun!) the story clearly enough. Here's how he starts it:

When a federal trial judge tossed out the ethics conviction of former Senator Ted Stevens last week, his lawyers promulgated the story of an innocent man victimized by unscrupulous prosecutors.But the five-week trial of Mr. Stevens offered a different version of him, and only a discrete part of that was directly affected by the discovery of repeated instances of prosecutorial misconduct.The disclosures that prosecutors had withheld information from the defense did little to erase much of the evidence that Mr. Stevens, who had been a powerful and admired political figure in Alaska, regularly and willingly accepted valuable gifts from friends and favor-seekers that he did not report.

And, in this quote -- "His name is cleared. He is innocent of the charges as if they had never been brought" -- Stevens' lawyer, Brendan Sullivan, provides a perfect distillation of the lawyerly fiction that nothing is a fact until it meets the procedural tests of a trial. It's the ideal setup for Lewis' examination of the facts.Lewis even ponders more philosophical realms when he writes, "The dismissal of the charges, a victory for Mr. Stevens and his lawyers, raises the question of what it means to say that someone is innocent."This is the sort of story I love because it pits the journalistic/common view of facts against the legal/procedural view. Merely asking the question that Lewis' story is based on is enough to drive lawyers wild, and that gives me great joy. But when it comes to the hard part -- showing what evidence stands unshaken by prosecutors' unfair discovery tactics -- Lewis can offer only one example: a gift of a massage chair. We learn that Stevens likes it so much he often falls asleep in it. Much of the evidence of unreported gifts to Stevens, Lewis concedes, concerned renovations of Stevens' vacation home in Alaska. And that's the evidence that Sullivan could have undermined more effectively if given a fair chance.Lewis offers supporting quotes for his thesis by two jurors. One wrote on her blog that Stevens is still guilty in her mind. She offers no argument about why some evidence was untouched by the hidden exculpatory evidence. The other is only an alternate (so he didn't sit through deliberations). He tells Lewis there was so much evidence. 'I mean he had the chair,' the juror offers. So we're left with ... a vibrating sleepy chair. Perhaps the "news analysis" bug on this story meant only that the Times didn't have reported facts to back up its read-between-the-lines conclusion that Stevens is still a sleaze.

Full post as published by Lawbeat on April 12, 2009 (boomark / email).