NYT News Analysis: Dismissal for Stevens, but Question on ‘Innocent’

[steven johnson]

Source: New York Times

By NEIL A. LEWIS
Published: April 11, 2009
WASHINGTON — 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.

The reasons for the dismissal of the case do not, for example, have any bearing on undisputed testimony that a Stevens friend, Bob Persons, bought an expensive massage chair for the senator and had it delivered to his Washington home. When Mr. Stevens told Mr. Persons he could not accept the chair as a gift because of ethics restrictions, they both then agreed to deem the chair a loan.



Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/us/politics/12stevens.html?hpw

[Blue_In_AK]

1. It's good to see

some common sense prevailing Outside, even if many Alaskans now believe that Ted did absolutely nothing wrong. His near canonization here since the dismissal of the case is truly disturbing. But then Alaskans have never been known for being discriminating when it comes to the ethics of their politicians, to our eternal shame.

[AZ Criminal JD]

2. The prosecutors encouraged the contractor to lie under oath.

Mr. Stevens may have been ethically challenged but that does not mean he was guilty of violating a criminal statute. The contractor testified at the trial that he did 250k of work at Stevens' home in Alaska. The government then used that figure to argue to the jury that Stevens must have known about it because it was so large. The true figure was 80k. It can be argued that Stevens who spent most of his time in DC did not know of the improvements represented by the smaller figure.

[Blue_In_AK]

3. Mr. Stevens is ethically challenged for sure,

and what many of us up here were wondering is why the feds went after him so hard on this piddling "failure to disclose" thing when there were so many more serious issues they could have looked into and charged him with.

I guess we should just be thankful that he is no longer in his position of power and hope that Mark Begich is more cognizant of ethical boundaries than Ted was.

[No Elephants]

4. Bill Ayers and his wife turned themselves in, but got off bc of prosecutorial misconduct. The

Republicans never claimed they were innocent. (For that matter, neither did the Ayers.) To the contrary, they tried to make blowing up a toilet in the Pentagon at night, when no one was around, sound as bad as flying a plane into the Twin Towers at the start of the workday.

Could this possibly be any more hypocritical? (If there is a way to make it more hypocritical, shhhh. Don't give them any ideas, because the depths to which they sink has no limits.)