Wrongful Prosecution: Stevens and Siegelman

[Jackpine Radical]

I was sitting here brooding about the fact that Holder is going after the miscreants who bungled the Stevens prosecution while leaving the Siegelman case to fester.

Now, I have no doubt that Stevens was guilty of a lot of abuses, or that he deserved to be convicted, but if his prosecutors broke the law, then I have no problem with his conviction being set aside. And, given that he is 84, I have no real problem with a decision not to retry him.

But what about Siegelman? A case where the prosecutorial misconduct was not only egregious and politically motivated, but ended up convicting an innocent man and setting a precedent that, if allowed to stand, would essentially permit the politically motivated prosecution of almost any politician who accepts a campaign contribution. "Where's the justice?" I asked myself.

Then something dawned on me. Maybe, rather than being a miscarriage, this is a clever piece of strategy.

First Holder acts on the case of a political opponent who had been unethically prosecuted. Nobody can accuse him of political favoritism when his first action against the prosecutors of the Bush DOJ is to free a wrongfully convicted (albeit no doubt guilty) political opponent. Stevens, an old and now relatively harmless man, walks, and the Bush DOJ is shown up for its corruption.

THEN he goes after the Siegelman case, and the incontrovertible message for all the world to see is "Here's another case where the corrupt Bush-era prosecutors did a gross injustice."


Had Holder taken on the Siegelman case first, many would have seen it as a political act. By taking on Stevens first, holder sends the message that he is simple, and properly, righting the wrongs of his predecessors.


Only time will tell whether Holder is being brilliant or stupid.

[OwnedByFerrets]

1. He should have followed it up immediately with the

Siegelman case. I assume he can do two things at once.

[Jackpine Radical]

2. Yeah. I know.

I keep hoping that there is sme good reason for this delay, though.

[L. Coyote]

3. Meanwhile, on planet USA, the DoJ had to act on the defense motion to retry the case

in accord with the court's schedule. Sometimes in the justice system, a judge has the boss running around on the court's schedule. It seems this is the case here, where USG had to either defend it's actions or back down. The Titanic had already been sent to the bottom, Holder just acknowledged that the case had been prejudiced by DoJ "mishandling" the case. The "mishandling" is now the subject of a criminal inquiry with unknown targets, likely the prosecution lawyers to begin with. This may be a setup even, of politicization "against" Republicans, a manipulation of the Stevens case that is one more layer of politicization and gets him off after getting caught red-handed.

[Demeter]

4. Or Criminally Negligent

and then let's talk about the traitors and war criminals, hmmm? We won't forget!

[Jackpine Radical]

5. Remember the old legal principle:

The difference between negligence, gross negligence, and criminal negligence is that between a fool, a damned fool, and a Goddamned fool.