DOJ Moves to Dismiss Case After Government Had Problems Turning Over Exculpatory Evidence.
Defending criminal cases can be an expensive proposition. Just ask former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens.
He was convicted on public corruption charges by a jury. However, his case was fraught with problems. Department of Justice’s (DOJ’s) Public Integrity Section had its own integrity problems during the case as far as failing to timely turn over potential exculpatory evidence to the Mr. Stevens’ defense team. (This has resulted in contempt charges being filed against three DOJ attorneys involved in the prosecution side of the case.) District Judge Emmet Sullivan asked the DOJ unit how he was to find that it had integrity given some of the events occurring in the case.
Finally, on April 1, 2009, U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr. moved to dismiss the case with prejudice, 5 months after Mr. Stevens was convicted on public corruption charges. The motion to dismiss will be heard on April 7, 2009.
It has been reported that Mr. Stevens spent at least $2 million in attorney’s fees in defense of the federal criminal charges. I guess we will all have to wait to see if he attempts to recover fees against the Government, although he will have to prove that the prosecution was frivolous in nature.
This case does illustrate the expense incurred in defending against high-profile criminal cases. In some future posts, we will discuss the interplay between criminal defense retainers and third party efforts to attack them as shielding illicit moneys.
For more information on the history of the Stevens case, see Mike Scarcella and Joe Palazzolo’s April 6, 2009 article “Series of Errors Doomed Stevens Prosecution” in the Legal Times, available for reading on Law.com.