Legal News

Whatever Happened to That Key Witness in the Ted Stevens Trial?

By Dan Slater

Yesterday, Senator Ted Stevens’s defense team, headed by Williams & Connolly’s Brendan Sullivan, threw Stevens’s corruption trial into a temporary tailspin when they requested a mistrial based on allegations of withheld evidence. Stevens is facing charges that he accepted more than $250,000 in gifts — including home renovations — from Veco Corp., an oil-services company.

Rocky Williams, a construction foreman who was involved in the renovations on Stevens’s home and who was supposed to be a witness for the prosecution, had, according to defense lawyers, returned to Alaska without explanation. But it seems there was an explanation, according to the government’s memorandum in opposition to the request for a mistrial. Williams, they say, was too sick to testify. From the government’s papers:

True to form, defense counsel continues with their “win at all cost” tactics. . .This time, defendant has gone too far, accusing the government of Brady violations and of proffering misleading evidence at trial. Nothing could be further from the truth . . .At the time when Mr. Williams was subpoenaed, the government anticipated that he would be one of the first witnesses in the government’s case-in-chief. However, when Mr. Williams arrived in Washington, D.C. and met with government counsel to prepare for his testimony, it was apparent to counsel that Mr. Williams had serious, health-related issues that warranted medical attention. . .Mr. Williams had lost a substantial amount of weight, his abdomen was distended (and had been previously drained of excess fluid), he appeared jaundiced, his face was gaunt, he had substantially aged, he had chronic coughing spells, and he was frequently short of breath. . . The government informed Mr. Williams that he should return to Alaska to attend to his health and to meet with his doctors.

As for the defense’s claim that Williams told them he spent much less time working on Stevens’s home than Veco’s accounting records indicate, undercutting the government’s argument that Veco spent $188,000 of its own money on Stevens’s house, the government responds: “[T]he issue is not whether the work was worth more than $188,000 or less. The key issue is whether it was worth more than the threshold amounts triggering disclosure on defendant’s financial disclosure forms.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on September 30, 2008 (boomark / email).