DOJ, a Nest of Pirates, Rattlesnakes and Liars

[JimBowie1958]

I had a 6 month contract to do work at the DOJ and what I heard while there was shocking to me. Their disdain for the American people is just mind boggling. Over and over I heard the American people referred to as 'cattle', 'idiots', and worse. Folks, the DOJ doe snot have our backs.

In fact it is quite the opposite as the DOJ is probably the most tightly organized criminal conspiracy on the planet as they break federal laws like shit from a goose. They abandoned any notion of 'justice' and have gone over to 'convict by any means necessary' a long long time ago.

Evidence Of Misconduct: Never Having To Say You're Sorry

When criminals break the law and are caught, they're prosecuted and punished. But what happens when prosecutors break the rules? In the case of one federal prosecutor in Boston: apparently not much.

In a three-part series in February, we reported the case of Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Auerhahn, who was found by two courts to have withheld evidence that could have cleared the defendant of murder. Auerhahn knew his chief witness was lying — the witness's own admission — but covered it up.

Legal experts and critics see Auerhahn's misconduct as part of an trend among federal prosecutors that has led to led to a number of high-profile cases being thrown out, including the conviction of former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens. As a disciplinary proceeding finally moves forward Thursday, we take another look at what is called part of a national scandal....

"If a criminal defense lawyer, for example, did what this prosecutor is charged with having done, he would have been disbarred by now."

Professor Monroe Freedman of Hofstra University is talking about local federal prosecutor Jeffrey Auerhahn.

Freedman is widely recognized as the nation's preeminent authority on legal ethics. He's often called a prophet. Auerhahn is recognized by some as a symbol of what has gone wrong with the system of holding federal prosecutors to account.

Seven years ago, Auerhahn came under the spotlight of a federal judge here in Boston, Mark Wolf. Wolf ruled that Auerhahn had deliberately withheld evidence that would have helped clear a defendant of a murder. The judge accused Auerhahn of engaging in a massive cover-up.

Indeed, in 2005, a higher court, the Court of Appeals, condemned Auerhahn’s actions as "outrageous", "manipulative" and "a grim picture of blatant misconduct."
Yet seven years after Wolf's ruling, and four years after the Court of Appeals ruling, Auerhahn’s still on the job as a front-line prosecutor. Indeed, he is now a prosecutor with the prestigious anti-terrorism unit, where he's currently the lead prosecutor against a woman connected to the Rwandan genocide. She is charged with making false statements, the same thing two courts have accused Auerhahn of doing.

What has not happened to Auerhahn is all too common, Freedman says. "This general failure to discipline prosecutors who are guilty of seriously unethical and unconstitutional conduct is one of the great scandals of the legal profession."​

 

[JimBowie1958]

Cover Story: A Cautionary Tale: The Ted Stevens Prosecution

On April 7, 2009, Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia unleashed his fury before a packed courtroom. For 14 minutes, he scolded. He chastised. He fumed. “In nearly 25 years on the bench,” he said, “I’ve never seen anything approaching the mishandling and misconduct that I’ve seen in this case.”

It was the culmination of a disastrous prosecution: the public corruption case against former U.S. Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK).

Stevens was convicted in October 2008 of violating federal ethics laws by failing to report thousands of dollars in gifts he received from friends. But a team of prosecutors from the U.S. Department of Justice is accused of failing to hand over key exculpatory evidence and knowingly presenting false evidence to the jury.

The Stevens case is a cautionary tale. It reminds lawyers and nonlawyers alike of the power and failures of our legal system and those who have sworn to uphold the rule of law. At the center of the story are real people: an old and powerful politician, a crack defense team, determined prosecutors, and their supervisors.

“This is a fascinating case study for all lawyers,” says criminal defense lawyer Stanley M. Brand, a partner at Brand Law Group, P.C. “In these high-stakes cases, both sides can get pretty aggressive and push the envelope. It’s great to be aggressive—it’s great to push, but this case reminds people that they have to observe the limits and the rules.”

For months Judge Sullivan had warned U.S. prosecutors about their repeated failure to turn over evidence. Then, after the jury convicted Stevens, the Justice Department discovered previously unrevealed evidence. Meanwhile, a prosecution witness and an agent from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) came forward alleging prosecutorial misconduct. Finally, newly appointed U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced that he had had enough and recommended that the seven-count conviction against the former Alaska senator be dismissed.

On April 7, Judge Sullivan did just that. But he was far from done.

In an extraordinarily rare move, he ordered an inquiry into the prosecutors’ handling of the case. Judge Sullivan insisted that the misconduct allegations were “too serious and too numerous” to be left to an internal Justice Department investigation. He appointed Washington lawyer Henry F. Schuelke III of Janis, Schuelke & Wechsler to investigate whether members of the trial team should be prosecuted for criminal contempt.

“It’s obviously a serious and not-everyday occurrence for a judge to sic an independent counsel on prosecutors,” Brand says. “It’s an auger for the Justice Department. This judge’s tolerance was pushed to the limit, and prosecutors are not going to just go on their merry way. When judges do things like this, it tends to rattle the system a bit.”

With two investigations pending—one court-appointed, the other conducted by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility—Justice Department officials say they are reviewing current discovery practices and retraining lawyers on their discovery obligations. It remains to be seen what consequences, if any, the prosecutors in this case will face.

“If all of our lives and careers were defined by our mistakes, nobody would have a job, so you hate to think that one mistake—even if it happens to be a highly publicized one—would damage someone’s career,” says Michael E. O’Neill, an associate professor who specializes in criminal law, criminal procedure, and constitutional law at George Mason University School of Law. “That said, prosecutors have to be absolutely fair and above board to ensure that justice is done.”

Brendan V. Sullivan Jr., Stevens’ defense lawyer and a senior partner at Williams & Connolly LLP, described the misconduct of prosecutors as “stunning.” He says the case is a sad story and a warning to everyone that any citizen can be convicted “if prosecutors are hell-bent on ignoring the Constitution and willing to present false evidence.”

But Assistant U.S. Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer, head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, says in a statement, “As we move forward in the continuing fight against public corruption, it is essential that the Criminal Division learns from the Stevens prosecution and its aftermath.”

Balance of Power
It is a common occurrence, especially in criminal cases: Lawyers who are battling it out in court push for every procedural advantage; they overstep their bounds and must be reined back in by the judge. There often are accusations that one side or the other is failing to produce evidence. But in the Stevens case, transcripts of multiple hearings show Judge Sullivan continuously reprimanding prosecutors for withholding discovery evidence.

Over the past few years, a series of high-profile scandals have rocked the Justice Department. For example, the department faced public outrage over its hiring process for U.S. attorneys under former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, the revelation of the Justice Department’s role in the so-called “torture memos,” and ongoing questions about aggressive prosecutorial tactics. For some, the Stevens case represents a government entity that had developed a “total indifference to ethics.”

“This has built up over the years—the people at [the Justice Department] have come to believe that they are immune, that nobody can touch them, and that judges will ignore their prosecutorial misconduct,” says Joseph E. diGenova, former U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia and a founding partner and criminal defense attorney at diGenova & Toensing, LLP.​

Concerns also have been expressed about the timing of the Stevens case, with the indictment coming just months before Stevens was up for reelection in his home state. The jury verdict against Stevens came eight days before Election Day. Subsequently, he lost to Democrat Mark Begich in an extraordinarily close contest, the effects of which benefit the Democrats. There are 60 members in the Senate’s Democratic Caucus, giving the party a firewall against bill-derailing filibusters. Had Stevens been able to keep his seat, Democrats would have 59 members, one short of the key 60-member vote.

DiGenova says that the “consequences of what the prosecutors did are remarkable” and the harm incalculable. “Had things been different, Stevens would have been elected. Prosecutors actually determined the outcome of the balance of power in the U.S. Senate by their misconduct. They affected politics in the United States,” he adds.

The Prosecutors
The Justice Department probe into Stevens and other Alaskan officials, known as Operation Polar Pen, lasted several years. Lawyers from Washington fought with lawyers from Alaska over how to handle the case and whether to bring charges in Alaska or the District of Columbia.

Some observers blame the subsequent problems in part on the lawyers’ personal conflicts and poor management. Others suggest that the Justice Department lawyers were no match for the stars that formed the defense team—they knew it and felt pressure to find any advantage they could.

But in actuality, some of the Justice Department’s finest lawyers handled the case. The trial team was part of an elite group of prosecutors in the Public Integrity (PIN) Section, with experience pursuing high-profile and complex cases.​

 

[JimBowie1958]

Report: Prosecutors Hid Evidence In Ted Stevens Case

A blistering report released Thursday found that the government team concealed documents that would have helped the late Stevens, a longtime Republican senator from Alaska, defend himself against false-statements charges in 2008. Stevens lost his Senate seat as the scandal played out, and he died in a plane crash two years later.

The 500-page report by investigator Henry F. Schuelke III shook the legal community, as law professors described it as a milestone in the history of prosecutorial misconduct.

Investigators weren't talking Thursday. But Brendan Sullivan, who defended the senator, had plenty to say.

"The extent of the corruption is shocking," Sullivan says. "It's the worst misconduct we've seen in a generation by prosecutors at the Department of Justice."

Failings Detailed

The report is based on a review of 128,000 documents and interviews with prosecutors and FBI agents on the hot seat.

It details critical failings by the government as it raced to get ready for the 2008 trial: disheveled files; key meetings at which FBI agents never took notes; insufficient management by supervisors at the Justice Department's criminal division; and pained egos that led resentful members of the prosecution team to stop talking to each other in the weeks before the case went to a Washington, D.C., jury.

For instance, the report says the Justice team argued to the jury that Stevens, who served the state of Alaska for 40 years, accepted pricey renovations to his Alaska chalet from oil services company executive Bill Allen.

Prosecutors argued that the senator didn't disclose the full value of the gift on his congressional disclosure forms. There was a problem with that, though, defense attorney Sullivan says: "Sen. Stevens had a handwritten note to Bill Allen requesting that Bill Allen send him a bill. It was the heart of the defense because the note said, 'Send me a bill. We have to do this ethically,' " Sullivan recalls.

But prosecutors reasoned that the senator was simply trying to cover his tracks, and they failed to turn over statements from a renovation foreman, Rocky Williams, who might well have supported the senator's account. They went on to present estimates about the cost of renovations that were wildly overblown, the report said.

The government team also left the jury with a mistaken impression that Allen had been telling authorities all along that Stevens had cooked up a cover story about wanting to pay all the bills. But in fact, the report says, Allen didn't mention that in 55 previous interviews with prosecutors and the FBI — only coming up with the account that helped the Justice Department on the eve of trial.

Finally, the report says, prosecutors should have shared information that might have obliterated Allen's credibility: an explosive allegation that Allen had a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old girl and then asked her to lie about it under oath.

'Not About Mistakes'

"It is incredible that in such an incredibly high-profile case, where a sitting United States senator is being prosecuted under the spotlight of the world with cameras watching and a top-notch defense team, that these kinds of egregious Brady violations could occur," says American University law professor Cynthia Jones.

Jones is referring to Brady v. Maryland, a landmark Supreme Court case that instructed prosecutors to turn over evidence that would favor criminal defendants. The team prosecuting Stevens also ran afoul of another long-standing Supreme Court precedent in the case of Giglio v. United States. In the Giglio case, the high court said prosecutors needed to share evidence that would help defendants impeach the credibility of government witnesses.

Everyone seems to agree the Stevens prosecution was infected with errors. The report blames higher-ups in the criminal division of the Bush Justice Department, Matt Friedrich and Rita Glavin, for failing to supervise the case. Friedrich didn't respond to requests for comment by email Thursday afternoon. Glavin said she didn't have access to the report or filings until Thursday and planned to comment once she had a chance to read through the material.

But lawyers for the lower-level Alaska prosecutors singled out Thursday — Joseph Bottini and James Goeke — said investigators had been unfair.

"The people who should be investigated and held responsible for the mistakes made in this case were the then upper management in the Department of Justice who, for political reasons, rushed this case to trial before the prosecution was prepared to try it," says Matthew Menchel, a lawyer for Goeke. "It was this decision ... that made it a fait accompli that the mistakes of the kind outlined in the Schuelke report would happen. Jim Goeke should not be made a scapegoat for problems that were caused by the upper echelon of the Department of Justice."

Defense attorney Ken Wainstein spoke out on behalf of Bottini, who has been a prosecutor for 27 years.

"The special prosecutor in this case looked at the mistakes that were made and, without any evidence and without any legal support, just concluded those mistakes were intentional misconduct," Wainstein says.

"This is not about mistakes," countered Sullivan, Stevens' defense lawyer. "This is not about negligence. This is not about incompetence. This is about intentional wrongdoing," he told reporters.

Stevens' former colleague in the U.S. Senate. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, introduced legislation Thursday that would make clear that prosecutors are required to turn over evidence that would help criminal defendants.

Their bill won immediate support from the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, the nonpartisan Constitution Project, and a past president of the American Bar Association.

Lasting Effects

The aftermath of the Stevens case has taken a toll on nearly everyone connected with it.

A young Justice Department lawyer who spent years prosecuting Alaska corruption, Nicholas Marsh, committed suicide at his home in September 2010 as the investigation continued. The report expressed "no conclusion as to his conduct," given his untimely death. Robert Luskin, an attorney for Marsh, said "he tried to do the right thing."

"We reject the contrary implications in the Schuelke report, which, like the very conduct that it purports to criticize, was the product of a well-intentioned, but ultimately misguided process," Luskin said.​

 

[Vastator]

Given all we know about corruption at the highest levels... It’s becoming increasingly difficult to maintain any level of respect for law enforcement, and the criminal justice system.

 

[JimBowie1958]

Why is lead FBI agent in botched Ted Stevens case still employed?

Why is lead FBI agent in botched Ted Stevens case still employed?

In late spring 2008, FBI agent Mary Beth Kepner was in the throes of building a case against the late Ted Stevens, then one of the nation's most powerful senators.

The case hinged on whether Stevens lied on his Senate disclosure forms about work he'd gotten done to his cabin in Girdwood, a ski town south of Anchorage, Alaska's largest city. Some of that work had been done by his friend Bill Allen, the head of VECO Corp., then the largest oilfield services company in the state.

Kepner speculated Allen bribed Stevens by remodeling the senator's house when talking to a reporter in spring 2008. But "What was the quid pro quo?" she asked....

In the end, federal prosecutors wouldn't find one. Rather, they'd allude to special favors Stevens did for Allen and VECO in return for the company's remodeling of his cabin when they successfully prosecuted him in fall 2008 for failing to disclose the renovations on his Senate forms.

Yet Kepner's insistence in making a case against Stevens, even if the facts didn't all line up in her favor, coupled with federal prosecutors cutting corners, ultimately led to the judge in the case tossing the guilty verdicts against "Uncle Ted," as Alaskans called him before he died in a 2010 plane crash.

Now, for the first time, Alaskans have a better idea of just what Kepner and her prosecutor cohorts were up to when they conducted their case against Stevens.

An internal report released publicly by the Justice Department in late May outlines transgressions on Kepner's part, ranging from not documenting interviews to hiding evidence from Stevens' legal team.

This misconduct raises the question of why the FBI still employs Kepner. It also helps to vindicate Kepner's former partner -- an FBI agent-turned whistleblower who warned after Stevens was convicted by a federal jury that his partner was reckless on the job.

One of the more dramatic moments in the wake of the Stevens trial came in December 2008, when an FBI agent alleged misdeeds by prosecutors and the lead agent on the case.

Whistleblower Chad Joy, then an FBI agent assigned to Alaska's sweeping political corruption probe, alleged, among other things, that Kepner had hid information that Stevens' legal team should have been entitled to review, leaked grand jury testimony of a government witness, and didn't document interviews.

Joy said in his complaint that Kepner, his partner, acted inappropriately with sources -- including being too cozy with witnesses such as Allen, as well as overly chatty with the media -- while building cases against Stevens and other Alaska politicians. Joy also accused her of failing to properly document for a judge an order for a wire tap.

Joy further alleged that members of the federal prosecution team withheld evidence and even sent a witness back to Alaska from Washington, D.C. -- where Stevens was on trial -- in order to render him unavailable to the defense.

The eight-page memo was the straw that broke the prosecution's case.

In April 2009, under advice from U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, a federal judge tossed the guilty verdicts against Stevens. Two reports -- one by a private lawyer assigned by the same judge, the other by the Justice Department itself -- documented the case and the allegations. Both reports are now public.​

 

[JimBowie1958]

https://www.amazon.com/Licensed-Lie-Exposing-Corruption-Department/dp/1612541496&tag=ff0d01-20

A tragic suicide, a likely murder, wrongful imprisonment, and gripping courtroom scenes draw readers into this compelling story giving them a frightening perspective on justice corrupted and who should be accountable when evidence is withheld. Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice is the true story of the strong-arm, illegal, and unethical tactics used by headline-grabbing federal prosecutors in their narcissistic pursuit of power. Its scope reaches from the US Department of Justice to the US Senate, the FBI, and the White House. This true story is a scathing attack on corrupt prosecutors, the judges who turned a blind eye to these injustices, and the president who has promoted them to powerful political positions.

From the Foreword

This book should serve as the beginning of a serious conversation about whether our criminal justice system continues to live up to its vaunted reputation. As citizens of a free society, we all have an important stake in making sure that it does.

-- Alex Kozinski, Chief Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Review
''Licensed to Lie reads like a cross between investigative journalism and courtroom drama. The takeaway is that both Bushies and Obamaites should be very afraid: over the last few years, a coterie of vicious and unethical prosecutors who are unfit to practice law has been harbored within and enabled by the now ironically named Department of Justice.'' --William Hodes, Professor of Law Emeritus, Indiana University, and coauthor, The Law of Lawyering

''When you ve finished reading this fast-paced thriller, you will want to stand up and applaud Powell's courage in daring to shine light into the darkest recesses of America's justice system. The only ax Powell grinds here is Truth.'' --Patricia Falvey, author of The Yellow House and The Linen Queen, and former Managing Director, PricewaterhouseCoopers, LLP

''Last year four government officials demonstrably lied under oath, and nothing has been done to them--two IRS officials, the Attorney General, and James Clapper-which caused Ed Snowden to release the fact that the US is spying on its citizens and in violation of the 4th amendment. That our government is corrupt is the only conclusion. This book helps the people understand the nature of this corruption-and how it is possible for federal prosecutors to indict and convict the innocent rather than the guilty.'' --Victor Sperandeo, CEO and author, Trader Vic: Methods of a Wall Street Master


''This book is a testament to the human will to struggle against overwhelming odds to right a wrong and a cautionary tale to all-that true justice doesn't just exist as an abstraction apart from us. True justice is us, making it real through our own actions and our own vigilance against the powerful who cavalierly threaten to take it away.'' --Michael Adams, PhD, University Distinguished Teaching Associate Professor of English Associate Director, James A. Michener Center for Writers, University of Texas--Austinor

''I have covered hundreds of court cases over the years and have witnessed far too often the kind of duplicity and governmental heavy-handedness Ms. Powell describes in her well-written book, Licensed to Lie.'' --Hugh Aynesworth, journalist, historian, four-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, author, November 22, 1963: Witness to History

Read more
Review


KIRKUS REVIEW
A former Justice Department lawyer, who now devotes her private practice to federal appeals, dissects some of the most politically contentious prosecutions of the last 15 years.

Powell assembles a stunning argument for the old adage, “nothing succeeds like failure,” as she traces the careers of a group of prosecutors who were part of the Enron Task Force. The Supreme Court overturned their most dramatic court victories, and some were even accused of systematic prosecutorial misconduct. Yet former task force members such as Kathryn Ruemmler, Matthew Friedrich and Andrew Weissman continued to climb upward through the ranks and currently hold high positions in the Justice Department, FBI and even the White House. Powell took up the appeal of a Merrill Lynch employee who was convicted in one of the subsidiary Enron cases, fighting for six years to clear his name. The pattern of abuse she found was repeated in other cases brought by the task force. Prosecutors of the accounting firm Arthur Andersen pieced together parts of different statutes to concoct a crime and eliminated criminal intent from the jury instructions, which required the Supreme Court to reverse the Andersen conviction 9-0; the company was forcibly closed with the loss of 85,000 jobs. In the corruption trial of former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, a key witness was intimidated into presenting false testimony, and as in the Merrill Lynch case, the prosecutors concealed exculpatory evidence from the defense, a violation of due process under the Supreme court’s 1963 Brady v. Maryland decision. Stevens’ conviction, which led to a narrow loss in his 2008 re-election campaign and impacted the majority makeup of the Senate, seems to have been the straw that broke the camel's back; the presiding judge appointed a special prosecutor to investigate abuses. Confronted with the need to clean house as he came into office, writes Powell, Attorney General Eric Holder has yet to take action.​

 

[JimBowie1958]

Who Polices Prosecutors Who Abuse Their Authority? Usually Nobody — ProPublica
Who Polices Prosecutors Who Abuse Their Authority? Usually Nobody
The innocent can wind up in prison. The guilty can be set free. But New York City prosecutors who withhold evidence, tolerate false testimony or commit other abuses almost never see their careers damaged....
But Bennett never served anywhere near that sentence. He has, in fact, been free since 2008 because Claude Stuart, the former Queens assistant district attorney who handled his case, violated a basic rule of law by withholding critical evidence from Bennett's attorney. A state appeals court overturnedBennett's conviction and released him after 13 years in prison.

That early release has freed Bennett to describe his role in a crime he had insisted for two decades he did not commit.

"He was wrapped up in a shower curtain in the corner of the bathroom, shivering and shaking," Bennett recalled of Powell, who Bennett said had terrorized his family for years. "He was saying all this, 'Please, please, don't hurt me, don't shoot, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.' And I said, 'Yeah, I'm sorry, too.' And I did what I had to do."

Stuart's wrongdoing in the Bennett case wasn't his only act of misconduct. He manipulated evidence in another case, and that conviction wound up being reversed by the courts, too. But his bosses took no action after that misconduct became known. A state disciplinary committee reprimanded Stuart, but that fact remained secret from the public. Indeed, Stuart's superiors did not act until another conviction was overturned, and Stuart was found to have lied to a trial judge about the whereabouts of a key defense witness.

That, at last, cost Stuart his job.

Stuart's career, across many years and with repeated abuses, helps demonstrate a broader truth: New York's system of attorney oversight is ill-equipped or unwilling to identify, punish and deter prosecutors who abuse their authority.

A ProPublica analysis of more than a decade's worth of state and federal court rulings found more than two dozen instances in which judges explicitly concluded that city prosecutors had committed harmful misconduct. In each instance, these abuses were sufficient to prompt courts to throw out convictions.

Yet the same appellate courts did not routinely refer prosecutors for investigation by the state disciplinary committees charged with policing lawyers. Disciplinary committees, an arm of the appellate courts, almost never took serious action against prosecutors. None of the prosecutors who oversaw cases reversed based on misconduct were disbarred, suspended, or censured except for Stuart. (Stuart declined repeated requests for an interview for this story.)

Nor were any but Stuart punished by their superiors in the city's district attorney offices. In fact, personnel records obtained by ProPublica show, several received promotions and raises soon after courts cited them for abuses.

 

[JimBowie1958]

The misconduct by the DOJ is not an accident or mistake, it is the standard of behavior in a department of our government that is critical to the justice process, and yet these people are the biggest law breaking group of gangsters on the planet.

Hundreds of Justice Department Attorneys Violated Professional Rules, Laws, or Ethical Standards

Hundreds of Justice Department Attorneys Violated Professional Rules, Laws, or Ethical Standards
Administration Won’t Name Offending Prosecutors...

An internal affairs office at the Justice Department has found that, over the last decade, hundreds of federal prosecutors and other Justice employees violated rules, laws, or ethical standards governing their work.

The violations include instances in which attorneys who have a duty to uphold justice have, according to the internal affairs office, misled courts, withheld evidence that could have helped defendants, abused prosecutorial and investigative power, and violated constitutional rights.

From fiscal year 2002 through fiscal year 2013, the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) documented more than 650 infractions, according to a Project On Government Oversight review of data obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and from OPR reports.

In the majority of the matters—more than 400—OPR categorized the violations as being at the more severe end of the scale: recklessness or intentional misconduct, as distinct from error or poor judgment.

The information the Justice Department has disclosed is only part of the story. No less significant is what as a matter of policy it keeps from the public.

As a general practice, the Justice Department does not make public the names of attorneys who acted improperly or the defendants whose cases were affected. The result: the Department, its lawyers, and the internal watchdog office itself are insulated from meaningful public scrutiny and accountability.

During the Clinton Administration, the Justice Department responded to such criticism by declaring that it would make more of OPR’s findings public, including the names of offenders, and it issued a policy statement extolling the importance of disclosure.[1] But the Department’s promise of greater openness had major caveats, and its subsequent track record of disclosing the results of investigations does not appear to have lived up to its rhetoric. The policy statement was scrapped during the George W. Bush Administration and has not been revived....

An examination of OPR case data for the past 12 fiscal years shows that, among the more severe violations—those that involve recklessness or intentional wrongdoing and are defined by the Department as professional misconduct—OPR substantiated:

• 
  
  
  • 48 allegations that federal attorneys misled courts, including 20 instances in which OPR determined that the violations were intentional
  • 29 allegations that federal prosecutors failed to provide exculpatory information to defendants, including 1 instance OPR concluded was intentional
  • 13 allegations that Justice Department personnel violated constitutional or civil rights
  • 4 allegations of abuse of investigative or prosecutorial authority or general prosecutorial misconduct, including 3 instances in which OPR determined that the violations were intentional
  • 3 allegations that prosecutors abused the grand jury or indictment process
  • 1 allegation of “overzealous prosecution”

POGO requested information on OPR investigations through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to augment the limited information available in OPR’s annual reports and data for the years 2004 through 2007 previously obtained through FOIA by governmentattic.org.[2] OPR annual reports contain statistics on allegations it received and investigations it conducted. They also include summaries of closed investigations. The past two annual reports provide a statistical breakdown of its investigative findings by infraction category.

During the 12-year period that POGO examined, OPR investigated about 2,100 allegations and substantiated about 650.

Among numerous investigations in which misconduct was found in fiscal year 2012, the most recent year for which OPR has issued an annual report,[3] OPR described these examples:

• 
  
  
  • A DOJ attorney failed to provide information to the defense that could have been used to counter a key witness for the prosecution. The DOJ attorney failed to disclose that, before the trial, another witness had implicated the key witness in the crime and had contradicted the key witness’s testimony. (The Department gave the DOJ attorney a 10-day suspension.)[4]

• 
  
  
  • A DOJ prosecutor developed a “close personal relationship” with the defendant in a case he was prosecuting, “had numerous personal contacts” with the defendant without the consent of the defendant’s lawyer, and, without telling his supervisors at the Justice Department, negotiated a plea agreement permitting release of the defendant from custody. (When the annual report was written, the Department had not determined what punishment, if any, to impose.)[5]

• 
  
  
  • A DOJ attorney was assigned a criminal case with 15 months remaining under the statute of limitations, the amount of time the government is given by law to file charges. He allowed the “clear and unambiguous” time limit to expire without filing charges or alerting the Department about the impending deadline so it could decide what to do. (The Department gave the DOJ attorney “a letter of admonishment.”)[6]

• 
  
  
  • An immigration judge—immigration courts fall within the Justice Department—made disparaging remarks about foreign nationals, showed bias, and violated procedural standards in cases where defendants were “contesting removal proceedings”—in other words, fighting to stay in the United States. (The Department gave the immigration judge a 30-day suspension.)[7]

• 
  
  
  • A DOJ attorney failed “to timely disclose to the defense a tape recording of the crime despite repeated defense requests for the information,” and falsely told the court that the government had no evidence that a key witness had been diagnosed with a mental illness. (The Department gave the attorney a 14-day suspension.)[8]

• 
  
  
  • A DOJ attorney failed to provide information to the defense that could have been used to counter a key witness for the prosecution. The DOJ attorney failed to disclose that, before the trial, another witness had implicated the key witness in the crime and had contradicted the key witness’s testimony. (The Department gave the DOJ attorney a 10-day suspension.)[4]

• 
  
  
  • A DOJ prosecutor developed a “close personal relationship” with the defendant in a case he was prosecuting, “had numerous personal contacts” with the defendant without the consent of the defendant’s lawyer, and, without telling his supervisors at the Justice Department, negotiated a plea agreement permitting release of the defendant from custody. (When the annual report was written, the Department had not determined what punishment, if any, to impose.)[5]

• 
  
  
  • A DOJ attorney was assigned a criminal case with 15 months remaining under the statute of limitations, the amount of time the government is given by law to file charges. He allowed the “clear and unambiguous” time limit to expire without filing charges or alerting the Department about the impending deadline so it could decide what to do. (The Department gave the DOJ attorney “a letter of admonishment.”)[6]

• 
  
  
  • An immigration judge—immigration courts fall within the Justice Department—made disparaging remarks about foreign nationals, showed bias, and violated procedural standards in cases where defendants were “contesting removal proceedings”—in other words, fighting to stay in the United States. (The Department gave the immigration judge a 30-day suspension.)[7]

• 
  
  
  • A DOJ attorney failed “to timely disclose to the defense a tape recording of the crime despite repeated defense requests for the information,” and falsely told the court that the government had no evidence that a key witness had been diagnosed with a mental illness. (The Department gave the attorney a 14-day suspension.)[8]

 

[JimBowie1958]

Given all we know about corruption at the highest levels... It’s becoming increasingly difficult to maintain any level of respect for law enforcement, and the criminal justice system.

The more local the LEOs the more you can trust them, to treat your fairly.

 

[JimBowie1958]

Witness to Abuse | Human Rights Abuses under the Material Witness Law since September 11

After I got in the cell I went kind of crazy. I was calling the guards to find out exactly what was my crime. Where's my lawyer if I have a lawyer. Because nobody told us anything. What's going to happen or what's going on. Nobody answered me so I kept banging on the door. Of course I start crying. The guard came, the supervisor or something. He starts yelling at me. I yelled back and I said need to know why I am here. I need to talk to somebody. He said we don't know, once we know, we will let you know. I felt he didn't know why we were being held. I had nothing to do but sit and cry. That's technically all we did. Sit and pray and cry. Sit and pray and cry.

-Tarek Albasti, a U.S. citizen detained in October 2001 by the U.S. Department of Justice as a material witness and held in solitary confinement in a federal prison in Chicago. The Department of Justice later apologized to him.

Americans are a free people, who know that freedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation.

-President George W. Bush, State of the Union Address, January 2003

Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, at least seventy men living in the United States-all Muslim but one-have been thrust into a Kafkaesque world of indefinite detention without charges, secret evidence, and baseless accusations of terrorist links. They have found themselves not at GuantnamoBay or Abu Ghraib but in America's own federal prison system, victims of the misuse of the federal material witness law in the U.S. government's fight against terrorism.

Congress enacted the current material witness law in 1984 to enable the government, in narrow circumstances, to secure the testimony of witnesses who might otherwise flee to avoid testifying in a criminal proceeding. If a court agrees that an individual has information "material" to a criminal proceeding and will likely flee if subpoenaed, the witness can be locked up-but, in theory, only for as long as is necessary to have him testify or be deposed.

Since September 11, however, the U.S. Department of Justice has deliberately used the law for a very different purpose: to secure the indefinite incarceration of those it has wanted to investigate as possible terrorist suspects. It has used the law to cast men into prison without any showing of probable cause that they had committed crimes. The Justice Department has also refused to respect fundamental constitutional and human rights of detainees, including the rights to be notified of charges, to have prompt access to an attorney, to view exculpatory evidence, and to know and be able to challenge the basis for arrest and detention.

The misuse of the material witness law has been harmful for those who have been wrongly held and damaging to the law itself. Innocent people have become the hapless victims of the government's zeal, because neither the Justice Department nor the courts have honored the letter and spirit of the material witness rules that protect everyone's right to freedom. In evading the requirement of probable cause of criminal conduct, the government bypassed checks on the reasonableness of its suspicion. As a result, men were imprisoned who had little or no information about, much less links, to terrorism. The Justice Department claimed each of the post-September 11 material witnesses had information relevant to grand jury terrorism investigations or to the trials of defendants alleged to support terrorist organizations. Yet at least thirty witnesses we know about were never brought before a grand jury or court to testify. Although our research suggests federal authorities suspected most if not all of the witnesses of terrorist-related conduct, only seven were ever arrested on terrorism-related charges.​

 

[beagle9]

Wow, books to read.. Yeeeeeee.... Uh yes I can read ok, but will have to come back to read these books later. Sad about our justice system, because we need transparency big time now.

 

[Vastator]

Given all we know about corruption at the highest levels... It’s becoming increasingly difficult to maintain any level of respect for law enforcement, and the criminal justice system.

The more local the LEOs the more you can trust them, to treat your fairly.

Unfortunately that isn’t true. While most of them are decent virtuous folks; their job is to get you into the system. Once they hand you over... Their involvement all but ends. So; unfortunately... they are the persons first point of contact into a corrupt system. Cogs in the machine.

 

[JimBowie1958]

She Was Convicted of Killing Her Mother. Prosecutors Withheld the Evidence That Would Have Freed Her.

oura Jackson called 911 at 5 a.m. on Sunday, June 5, 2005. ‘‘Please, I need, I need an ambulance, I need an ambulance right now!’’ she cried. ‘‘Someone broke into my house. My mom — my mom is bleeding.’’ She panted as she waited a few long seconds for the operator to transfer her. ‘‘She’s not breathing,’’ Noura said, sounding desperate, when an emergency dispatcher came on the line. ‘‘She’s not breathing. She’s not breathing. Please help me. There’s blood everywhere!’’

When the police arrived, Jennifer Jackson’s body lay on her bedroom floor in the brick home she owned in a well-kept Memphis neighborhood. Noura’s mother, a 39-year-old successful investment banker, had been stabbed 50 times. The brutal violence on a quiet block made local headlines, generating shock and anxiety in the middle-class corners of the city.

The police began their investigation with few leads. Jackson lived alone with her only child, Noura, who was 18 at the time. She had divorced Noura’s father when Noura was a baby. Investigators found broken glass on the kitchen floor, from a windowpane in the door that led from the garage to the kitchen. But the window seemed to have been broken from the inside, because the hole it made lined up with a door lock that could be seen only from the kitchen. And no one had seen an intruder. The police questioned Jackson’s on-again-off-again boyfriend. He called her around midnight on the night she was killed but told the police that he hung up before she answered and then went to sleep at his home, more than an hour from Memphis.

The police also questioned Noura. She said she found her mother’s body when she came home after being out all night. She had gone to a couple of parties with friends and then drove around by herself, stopping at a gas station and a Taco Bell....

With concern about the case mounting — ‘‘Mystery Stabbing Death Unsolved,’’ local ABC news reported that August — the case went to Amy Weirich, who at 40 was a rising star in the Memphis prosecutor’s office. A long-distance runner and the mother of four children, Weirich was a former chief of the gang-and-narcotics unit and the first woman to be named deputy district attorney in Shelby County. She was considered a highly skilled trial lawyer.

Studying the case, she developed a theory: Noura was bridling under her mother’s rules and killed her for money that she could use to keep partying with her friends. Jackson’s estate was valued at $1.5 million, including a life insurance policy. Weirich also argued that Noura and her mother were struggling over whether to sell a few cars that Noura inherited from her father, Nazmi Hassanieh, a former Lebanese Army captain. After a long separation, Noura got back in touch with her father when she was 16, and he texted and called her often. Sixteen months before her mother was killed, Hassanieh was shot to death in a Memphis convenience store he owned. His murder was never solved.

The police came to arrest Noura that September as she was finishing up a babysitting job. She had no history of violence, and the case quickly became a local sensation. Weirich asked for a life sentence. The judge, Chris Craft, eventually set a bond of $500,000. Unable to pay, Noura spent a total of three and a half years in jail awaiting trial, on a heavy regimen of anti-anxiety and antidepressant medication.

Noura’s private lawyer, Valerie Corder, thought Weirich’s case was weak. At the time of Noura’s indictment, the police were waiting for the DNA results from samples taken from the blood spattered around Jackson’s bedroom. When the results came back, they suggested that two or three people, whose identities were unknown to the police, had been in Jackson’s bedroom. Noura’s DNA was excluded as a match for any of the three DNA profiles. But Weirich dismissed the absence of Noura’s DNA. The DNA results ‘‘didn’t point to anything, as DNA often doesn’t,’’ she told me in an interview this past spring. No physical evidence ever linked Noura to the killing.

Noura’s trial aired live on Court TV in February 2009. Over two weeks, Weirich called witness after witness to portray Noura as rebellious and angry. One neighbor said that in the weeks before the murder, she overheard Noura demanding money from her mother ‘‘in a rage.’’ Noura’s half uncle said he heard Noura and her mother arguing over the cars. An aunt said Noura grew sullen when Jackson talked about sending her to boarding school and testing her for drugs. At the time of the trial, two of Noura’s aunts and the half uncle were suing her for the value of her mother’s life insurance policy and the rest of her estate.

Weirich and Stephen Jones, a second prosecutor who assisted at the trial, also introduced several witnesses who described Noura’s partying, sex life and drug use (mostly alcohol, marijuana and the opioid Lortab, which she was prescribed when she was 16 for pain she experienced from endometriosis, a disorder of the uterine tissue). Much of the testimony was tangential to Jackson’s death, but Judge Craft made the questionable decision to allow it, giving Weirich the chance to paint a picture of a teenager spinning out of control....

Near the end of the trial, Weirich introduced the only witness who placed Noura at the scene of the crime in the crucial time before her mother’s body was found. Andrew Hammack, a friend of Noura’s, testified that she called him between about 4 a.m. and 5 a.m. and asked him to meet her at her house. Weirich asked Hammack if Noura had ever done that before and if he considered the request normal. He said no. ‘‘She needed a cover-up,’’ Jones told the jury in his closing argument. ‘‘Someone to go inside with her so that they could say, ‘Yeah, I was with her when she found her mother’s body.’ ’’

Corder, Noura’s lawyer, was worried about the effect of the medication Noura was taking, and how she would hold up under cross-examination, and advised her not to testify. Corder called no witnesses, emphasizing instead to the jury that the DNA evidence pointed away from Noura to unknown suspects. In her final argument, Weirich stood facing Noura and raised the question the defense left unanswered by discouraging Noura from testifying. ‘‘Just tell us where you were!’’ she shouted, throwing up her hands in a gesture of impatience. ‘‘That’s all we are asking, Noura!’’

The jury deliberated for nine hours and then filed back into the courtroom. Noura, her thick dark hair falling to her shoulders, sat with her hands folded in her lap, wearing a blue and white flowered dress. She tried to make eye contact with some of the jurors, but they avoided her gaze. When she heard the words ‘‘guilty of second-degree murder,’’ her head fell.

After the trial, Weirich spoke to the local news media. ‘‘It’s a great verdict,’’ she said. Noura was sentenced to a prison term of 20 years and nine months. Weirich’s victory helped start her political career. In January 2011, she was appointed district attorney in Shelby County, after the elected district attorney left to join the administration of Gov. Bill Haslam. Weirich, a Republican, became the first woman to hold that post. She then won election in 2012 and 2014 with 65 percent of the vote, running on a law-and-order message against weak opponents. A friend said her husband, who is also a lawyer, began talking about moving the family into the Governor’s Mansion one day....

Five days after the jury found Noura guilty in 2009, Stephen Jones, the assistant prosecutor on the case, filed a motion to submit an ‘‘omitted’’ statement — a handwritten note that Andrew Hammack, Noura’s friend, gave to the police in the early days of the murder investigation. Jones later said he received Hammack’s note from the police in the middle of the trial, tucked it into a flap of his notebook intending to give it to Corder and then forgot about it until he put away his notebook after the case ended.

In the note, Hammack wrote that on the night of Jackson’s death, he left his cellphone with a friend and later was ‘‘rolling on XTC,’’ a reference to the drug also known as Ecstasy or Molly. Corder, who asked Weirich and Jones repeatedly before and during the trial if they had given her all the state’s information related to Hammack, believed that the note raised questions about Hammack’s credibility that she would have raised during the trial. Based in large part on the newly disclosed evidence, Corder appealed Noura’s conviction to the Tennessee Supreme Court.

On Aug. 22, 2014, the Tennessee Supreme Court unanimously overturned Noura’s conviction. ‘‘It is difficult to overstate the importance of this portion of Mr. Hammack’s testimony,’’ the justices wrote, pointing out that no DNA evidence linked Noura to the crime scene and that the ‘‘blood of unknown individuals’’ was ‘‘present in the victim’s bed.’’ Hammack’s note suggested that he might not have told the truth when he testified that Noura called and asked him to meet her at her house, the justices said. (Cellphone records showed that Hammack texted Noura and that she called him, but they did not show the content of the texts or whether he answered the call. Hammack did not respond to repeated requests for comment.) The court also explained how Noura’s lawyer could have used the note to argue ‘‘that Mr. Hammack himself was a plausible suspect.’’ The note contradicted Hammack’s alibi, opening a line of inquiry about his whereabouts when Jackson was killed. And it cast in a new light a visit Hammack’s friends made to the Memphis police station a week after Jackson’s murder, which Corder tried to explore at the trial. The friends reported that they didn’t know where Hammack was that night and that he had been acting strangely since then. The police didn’t pursue the lead.

The Tennessee Supreme Court called Jones and Weirich’s failure to disclose Hammack’s note before trial a ‘‘flagrant violation’’ of Noura’s constitutional rights. The justices also overturned the verdict against Noura for another reason — Weirich’s closing exclamation in front of the jury demanding: ‘‘Just tell us where you were! That’s all we are asking, Noura!’’ The Constitution’s protection of the right to remain silent means that a defendant’s decision not to testify ‘‘should be considered off limits to any conscientious prosecutor,’’ the Tennessee justices wrote, so that the jury doesn’t view it as an implicit admission of guilt. Weirich was ‘‘doubtless well aware’’ of the rule, the justices added in a striking footnote, citing three previous cases in which appellate judges criticized her and her office for making prejudicial statements to the jury.

 

[JimBowie1958]

Given all we know about corruption at the highest levels... It’s becoming increasingly difficult to maintain any level of respect for law enforcement, and the criminal justice system.

The more local the LEOs the more you can trust them, to treat your fairly.

Unfortunately that isn’t true. While most of them are decent virtuous folks; their job is to get you into the system. Once they hand you over... Their involvement all but ends. So; unfortunately... they are the persons first point of contact into a corrupt system. Cogs in the machine.

Agreed, but my point is the higher you go up the more likely the prosecutor or DA is a political animal looking to climb up the ladder of power on the backs of innocent people.

 

[JimBowie1958]

Misbehaving Federal Prosecutors

Misbehaving Federal Prosecutors
A USA Today investigation finds egregious misconduct at the Department of Justice, with few consequences.

Radley Balko | September 27, 2010

Last week, USA Today published the results of a six-month investigation into misconduct by America’s federal prosecutors. The investigation turned up what Pace University law professor Bennett Gershman called a pattern of “serious, glaring misconduct.” Reporters Brad Heath and Kevin McCoy documented 201 cases in which federal prosecutors were chastised by federal judges for serious ethical breaches, ranging from withholding important exculpatory evidence to lying in court to making incriminating but improper remarks in front of juries....

The list is by no means comprehensive, and doesn’t claim to be. I checked the paper’s website for examples of egregious misconduct reported here at Reason: U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan’s politically-charged prosecution of Pennsylvania doctor Bernard Rottschaefer; Assistant U.S. Attorney Brett Grayson’s outrageous persecution of the Colomb family in Louisiana; and the bogus Mann Act charges brought against Mississippi heart surgeon, Dr. Roger Wiener. None are among the cases in USA Today’s database. The paper should be lauded for its groundbreaking investigation, but as the reporters themselves acknowledge, they’ve really only scratched the surface. (The investigation also only looked at federal cases, which comprise just a tiny portion of the country’s total criminal prosecutions.)

When the Bush administration drew criticism for firing seven U.S. attorneys a few years ago, much of the outrage was directed at the administration’s perceived politicization of the Justice Department. But that was really only a symptom of a more fundamentally broken system. The deeper problem is that we have a federal criminal justice system that can be so easily manipulated in the first place. The number of federal laws reaches well into the thousands, and it's growing. Many are so broadly written they allow prosecutors to ring just about anyone they please up on federal charges. This creates a system driven by politics, not justice. It makes criminals out of all of us, making actual enforcement of the law arbitrary and corruptible. Worse, every incentive for a federal prosecutor pushes in the direction of winning convictions, with little if any sanction for crossing ethical and legal boundaries in the process. It's a system that’s not only ripe for abuse, but that actually rewards it....

Of the 201 cases USA Today reviewed in which a judge publicly reprimanded a prosecutor, the paper found just one in which a prosecutor "was barred even temporarily from practicing law for misconduct." The Justice Department refused to tell the paper about which, if any, of the cases resulted in internal discipline taken against the offending prosecutors. Rather appallingly, DOJ cited the need to protect the prosecutors' privacy. Never mind that they’re public servants who have been reprimanded by a federal judge for abusing their power. Not to mention that said power is among the most serious we afford to a government official. Prosecutors have the power to take away a citizens’ freedom. Even in cases that don’t result in a conviction, a federal indictment or even investigation can bankrupt the target of the investigation. The idea that prosecutors who abuse that power should be escape public scrutiny out of concern for their privacy is not only preposterous, it's another symptom of a system with misplaced priorities.

USA Today’s finding of little to no sanction for misbehaving prosecutors is consistent with other studies. According to an Innocence Project study of 75 DNA exonerations, prosecutorial misconduct factored into just under half of those wrongful convictions. In none of those cases did the offending prosecutor face any serious sanction. A 2006 Yale Law Journal look at violations of the Brady rule, which requires prosecutors to turn over exculpatory evidence to defense attorneys, found "[a] prosecutor's violation of the obligation to disclose favorable evidence accounts for more miscarriages of justice than any other type of malpractice, but is rarely sanctioned by courts, and almost never by disciplinary bodies." A 2009 brief filed by the Cato Institute, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys in the U.S. Supreme Court case Pottawattamie v. McGhee noted that studies of wrongful convictions in California, New York, and Chicago all found that though prosecutorial misconduct contributed to a sizable majority of cases that sent innocent people to prison in those states, the misbehaving prosecutors were rarely if ever sanctioned.

During oral arguments in that case, a majority of Supreme Court justices seemed to indicate that they may finally be ready to put a dent in absolute prosecutorial immunity, the complete protection (which has no basis in the U.S. Constitution and no common law tradition) we give prosecutors from lawsuits from the people they prosecute, even in cases where a prosecutor’s gross negligence contributed to a wrongful conviction. At issue in Pottawattamie was whether absolute immunity should protect prosecutors even in cases where they intentionally manufacture evidence that causes a wrongful conviction. That case was settled before the Court could issue a decision, but the Court will revisit the question next term, in the case Connick v. Thompson. It isn’t difficult to see how shielding prosecutors from liability even in an obvious frame job creates some some pretty twisted incentives.

The position of U.S. Attorney is often seen as a stepping stone to a political career, which makes those who occupy the office notorious publicity hounds. They’re known to taint jury pools by calling high-profile press conferences in which they convict suspects in public before stepping foot in the courtroom. And woe to the defendant who uses the press to fight back. Consider what happened to Siobhan Reynolds, the pain patient activist who often uses similar media tactics to combat what she perceives to be the federal government’s wrongful targeting of physicians who prescribe opioid painkillers. When Reynolds mounted a public relations campaign in response to Assistant U.S. Attorney Tonya Treadway’s prosecution of Kansas physician Steven Schneider and his wife, Treadway turned her sights on Reynolds. Treadway launched a grand jury investigation of Reynolds and her patient organization, ordering Reynolds to turn over a trove of documents related to her advocacy on behalf of the Schneiders and other physicians and patients.

The only way to address this issue is to pierce the cone of infallibility we put around prosecutors. There’s a presumption that because they’re public servants, prosecutors should be given the benefit of the doubt, that even grievous mistakes should be assumed to have been unintentional, or that because they’re pursuing a goal most of us consider to be in the public interest—putting bad guys behind bars—even intentional infractions should be lightly sanctioned, or overlooked entirely.

 

[bodecea]

I had a 6 month contract to do work at the DOJ and what I heard while there was shocking to me. Their disdain for the American people is just mind boggling. Over and over I heard the American people referred to as 'cattle', 'idiots', and worse. Folks, the DOJ doe snot have our backs.

In fact it is quite the opposite as the DOJ is probably the most tightly organized criminal conspiracy on the planet as they break federal laws like shit from a goose. They abandoned any notion of 'justice' and have gone over to 'convict by any means necessary' a long long time ago.

Evidence Of Misconduct: Never Having To Say You're Sorry

When criminals break the law and are caught, they're prosecuted and punished. But what happens when prosecutors break the rules? In the case of one federal prosecutor in Boston: apparently not much.

In a three-part series in February, we reported the case of Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Auerhahn, who was found by two courts to have withheld evidence that could have cleared the defendant of murder. Auerhahn knew his chief witness was lying — the witness's own admission — but covered it up.

Legal experts and critics see Auerhahn's misconduct as part of an trend among federal prosecutors that has led to led to a number of high-profile cases being thrown out, including the conviction of former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens. As a disciplinary proceeding finally moves forward Thursday, we take another look at what is called part of a national scandal....

"If a criminal defense lawyer, for example, did what this prosecutor is charged with having done, he would have been disbarred by now."

Professor Monroe Freedman of Hofstra University is talking about local federal prosecutor Jeffrey Auerhahn.

Freedman is widely recognized as the nation's preeminent authority on legal ethics. He's often called a prophet. Auerhahn is recognized by some as a symbol of what has gone wrong with the system of holding federal prosecutors to account.

Seven years ago, Auerhahn came under the spotlight of a federal judge here in Boston, Mark Wolf. Wolf ruled that Auerhahn had deliberately withheld evidence that would have helped clear a defendant of a murder. The judge accused Auerhahn of engaging in a massive cover-up.

Indeed, in 2005, a higher court, the Court of Appeals, condemned Auerhahn’s actions as "outrageous", "manipulative" and "a grim picture of blatant misconduct."
Yet seven years after Wolf's ruling, and four years after the Court of Appeals ruling, Auerhahn’s still on the job as a front-line prosecutor. Indeed, he is now a prosecutor with the prestigious anti-terrorism unit, where he's currently the lead prosecutor against a woman connected to the Rwandan genocide. She is charged with making false statements, the same thing two courts have accused Auerhahn of doing.

What has not happened to Auerhahn is all too common, Freedman says. "This general failure to discipline prosecutors who are guilty of seriously unethical and unconstitutional conduct is one of the great scandals of the legal profession."​

Cool story, boyo.

 

[bodecea]

Cover Story: A Cautionary Tale: The Ted Stevens Prosecution

On April 7, 2009, Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia unleashed his fury before a packed courtroom. For 14 minutes, he scolded. He chastised. He fumed. “In nearly 25 years on the bench,” he said, “I’ve never seen anything approaching the mishandling and misconduct that I’ve seen in this case.”

It was the culmination of a disastrous prosecution: the public corruption case against former U.S. Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK).

Stevens was convicted in October 2008 of violating federal ethics laws by failing to report thousands of dollars in gifts he received from friends. But a team of prosecutors from the U.S. Department of Justice is accused of failing to hand over key exculpatory evidence and knowingly presenting false evidence to the jury.

The Stevens case is a cautionary tale. It reminds lawyers and nonlawyers alike of the power and failures of our legal system and those who have sworn to uphold the rule of law. At the center of the story are real people: an old and powerful politician, a crack defense team, determined prosecutors, and their supervisors.

“This is a fascinating case study for all lawyers,” says criminal defense lawyer Stanley M. Brand, a partner at Brand Law Group, P.C. “In these high-stakes cases, both sides can get pretty aggressive and push the envelope. It’s great to be aggressive—it’s great to push, but this case reminds people that they have to observe the limits and the rules.”

For months Judge Sullivan had warned U.S. prosecutors about their repeated failure to turn over evidence. Then, after the jury convicted Stevens, the Justice Department discovered previously unrevealed evidence. Meanwhile, a prosecution witness and an agent from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) came forward alleging prosecutorial misconduct. Finally, newly appointed U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced that he had had enough and recommended that the seven-count conviction against the former Alaska senator be dismissed.

On April 7, Judge Sullivan did just that. But he was far from done.

In an extraordinarily rare move, he ordered an inquiry into the prosecutors’ handling of the case. Judge Sullivan insisted that the misconduct allegations were “too serious and too numerous” to be left to an internal Justice Department investigation. He appointed Washington lawyer Henry F. Schuelke III of Janis, Schuelke & Wechsler to investigate whether members of the trial team should be prosecuted for criminal contempt.

“It’s obviously a serious and not-everyday occurrence for a judge to sic an independent counsel on prosecutors,” Brand says. “It’s an auger for the Justice Department. This judge’s tolerance was pushed to the limit, and prosecutors are not going to just go on their merry way. When judges do things like this, it tends to rattle the system a bit.”

With two investigations pending—one court-appointed, the other conducted by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility—Justice Department officials say they are reviewing current discovery practices and retraining lawyers on their discovery obligations. It remains to be seen what consequences, if any, the prosecutors in this case will face.

“If all of our lives and careers were defined by our mistakes, nobody would have a job, so you hate to think that one mistake—even if it happens to be a highly publicized one—would damage someone’s career,” says Michael E. O’Neill, an associate professor who specializes in criminal law, criminal procedure, and constitutional law at George Mason University School of Law. “That said, prosecutors have to be absolutely fair and above board to ensure that justice is done.”

Brendan V. Sullivan Jr., Stevens’ defense lawyer and a senior partner at Williams & Connolly LLP, described the misconduct of prosecutors as “stunning.” He says the case is a sad story and a warning to everyone that any citizen can be convicted “if prosecutors are hell-bent on ignoring the Constitution and willing to present false evidence.”

But Assistant U.S. Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer, head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, says in a statement, “As we move forward in the continuing fight against public corruption, it is essential that the Criminal Division learns from the Stevens prosecution and its aftermath.”

Balance of Power
It is a common occurrence, especially in criminal cases: Lawyers who are battling it out in court push for every procedural advantage; they overstep their bounds and must be reined back in by the judge. There often are accusations that one side or the other is failing to produce evidence. But in the Stevens case, transcripts of multiple hearings show Judge Sullivan continuously reprimanding prosecutors for withholding discovery evidence.

Over the past few years, a series of high-profile scandals have rocked the Justice Department. For example, the department faced public outrage over its hiring process for U.S. attorneys under former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, the revelation of the Justice Department’s role in the so-called “torture memos,” and ongoing questions about aggressive prosecutorial tactics. For some, the Stevens case represents a government entity that had developed a “total indifference to ethics.”

“This has built up over the years—the people at [the Justice Department] have come to believe that they are immune, that nobody can touch them, and that judges will ignore their prosecutorial misconduct,” says Joseph E. diGenova, former U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia and a founding partner and criminal defense attorney at diGenova & Toensing, LLP.​

Concerns also have been expressed about the timing of the Stevens case, with the indictment coming just months before Stevens was up for reelection in his home state. The jury verdict against Stevens came eight days before Election Day. Subsequently, he lost to Democrat Mark Begich in an extraordinarily close contest, the effects of which benefit the Democrats. There are 60 members in the Senate’s Democratic Caucus, giving the party a firewall against bill-derailing filibusters. Had Stevens been able to keep his seat, Democrats would have 59 members, one short of the key 60-member vote.

DiGenova says that the “consequences of what the prosecutors did are remarkable” and the harm incalculable. “Had things been different, Stevens would have been elected. Prosecutors actually determined the outcome of the balance of power in the U.S. Senate by their misconduct. They affected politics in the United States,” he adds.

The Prosecutors
The Justice Department probe into Stevens and other Alaskan officials, known as Operation Polar Pen, lasted several years. Lawyers from Washington fought with lawyers from Alaska over how to handle the case and whether to bring charges in Alaska or the District of Columbia.

Some observers blame the subsequent problems in part on the lawyers’ personal conflicts and poor management. Others suggest that the Justice Department lawyers were no match for the stars that formed the defense team—they knew it and felt pressure to find any advantage they could.

But in actuality, some of the Justice Department’s finest lawyers handled the case. The trial team was part of an elite group of prosecutors in the Public Integrity (PIN) Section, with experience pursuing high-profile and complex cases.​

Ah...St. Ted of Alaska.

 

[JimBowie1958]

When Washington overlords (federal prosecutors) break rules, wreck lives

A group of Washington overlords -- federal prosecutors -- sometimes break rules and wreck people’s lives.

President Obama may soon appoint one of them to be America’s next attorney general.

The prosecutorial bullying is detailed in a new book by Sidney Powell, “Licensed to Lie.”

She reports that the Department of Justice’s narcissistic and dishonest prosecutors destroy people by doing things like deliberately withholding evidence.

Remember the Arthur Andersen accounting firm?

It was killed off by ambitious prosecutors who claimed the company helped Enron commit accounting fraud and then shredded the evidence.

But instead of charging people who allegedly ordered evidence destroyed, the DOJ indicted the entire company. That destroyed the accounting firm. Publicly traded companies cannot do business with companies under criminal investigation, so Andersen lost most of its clients.

The prosecutor’s purpose, says Powell, was to chill resistance from other companies that might dare fight the Feds. The message: cooperate, or we will destroy you! These pressure tactics were appropriate, said one prosecutor, because shredding documents “attacks the justice system itself by impeding investigators and regulators from getting at the truth.”

But who actually hid the truth?

The prosecutors, writes Powell. In fact, Andersen had saved most of its documents and gave them to the government. The prosecutors simply lied to the court about it.

Eventually, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Arthur Andersen’s conviction. But by then, 80,000 employees had lost their jobs -- 80,000 people who’d done nothing wrong.

 

[JimBowie1958]

The Untouchables: America's Misbehaving Prosecutors, And The System That Protects Them | HuffPost

POLITICS
08/01/2013 02:18 pm ET Updated Dec 06, 2017
The Untouchables: America’s Misbehaving Prosecutors, And The System That Protects Them

NEW ORLEANS — Some questions seem particularly prone to set John Thompson off. Here’s one he gets a lot: Have the prosecutors who sent him to death row ever apologized?

“Sorry? For what?” says Thompson. The 49-year-old is lean, almost skinny. He wears jeans, a T-shirt and running shoes and sports a thin mustache and soul patch, both stippled with gray. “You tell me that. Tell me what the hell would they be sorry for. They tried to kill me. To apologize would mean they’re admitting the system is broken.” His voice has been gradually increasing in volume. He’s nearly yelling now. “That everyone around them is broken. It’s the same motherfucking system that’s protecting them.”

He paces as he talks. His voice soars and breaks. At times, he gets within a few inches of me, jabbing his finger in my direction for emphasis. Thompson pauses as he takes a phone call from his wife. His tone changes for the duration of the conversation. Then he hangs up and resumes with the indignation. “What would I do with their apology anyway? Sorry. Huh. Sorry you tried to kill me? Sorry you tried to commit premeditated murder? No. No thank you. I don’t need your apology.”

The wrongly convicted often show remarkable grace and humility. It’s inspiring to see, if a little difficult to understand; even after years or decades in prison, exonerees are typically marked by an absence of bitterness.

Not Thompson, but you can hardly blame him. Even among outrageous false conviction stories, his tale is particularly brutal. He was wrongly convicted not once, but twice — separately — for a carjacking and a murder. He spent 18 years at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, 14 of them on death row. His death warrant was signed eight times. When his attorneys finally found the evidence that cleared him — evidence his prosecutors had known about for years — he was weeks away from execution.

But what most enrages Thompson — and what drives his activism today — is that in the end, there was no accountability. His case produced a surfeit of prosecutorial malfeasance, from incompetence, to poor training, to a culture of conviction that included both willfully ignoring evidence that could have led to his exoneration, to blatantly withholding it. Yet the only attorney ever disciplined in his case was a former prosecutor who eventually aided in Thompson’s defense....

“This isn’t about bad men, though they were most assuredly bad men,” Thompson says. “It’s about a system that is void of integrity. Mistakes can happen. But if you don’t do anything to stop them from happening again, you can’t keep calling them mistakes.”

Over the last year or so, a number of high-profile stories have fostered discussion and analysis of prosecutorial power, discretion and accountability: the prosecution and subsequent suicide of Internet activist Aaron Swartz; the Obama administration’s unprecedented prosecution of whistleblowers; the related Department of Justice investigations into the sources of leaks that have raised First Amendment concerns; and aggressive prosecutions that look politically motivated, such as the pursuit of medical marijuana offenders in states where the drug has been legalized for that purpose. In May, an 82-year-old nun and two other peace activists were convicted of “sabotage” and other “crimes of violence” for breaking into a nuclear weapons plant to unfurl banners, spray paint and sing hymns. Even many on the political right, traditionally a source of law-and-order-minded support for prosecutors, have raised concerns about “overcriminalization” and the corresponding power the trend has given prosecutors.

Most recently, the Justice Department came under fire for its investigation of leaks to the media, including a broad subpoena for phone records of the Associated Press, and for obtaining the phone and email records of Fox News reporter James Rosen. In the Rosen case, Attorney General Eric Holder personally signed off on a warrant that claimed that merely publishing information that had been leaked to him made Rosen a criminal co-conspirator. Many have pointed out that such a charge would make it a crime to practice journalism.

President Obama has since expressed his dismay at the Rosen warrant, but his response was curious. He asked Holder to investigate the possible misconduct that not only occurred under Holder’s supervision, but in which Holder himself may have participated.

In asking Eric Holder to investigate Eric Holder, Obama illustrated the difficulty of adequately addressing prosecutorial misconduct as well as anyone possibly could: Prosecutors are relied upon to police themselves, and it isn’t working. A growing chorus of voices in the legal community says the problem is rooted in a culture of infallibility, from Holder on down. And it’s against this backdrop — this environment of legal invincibility — that we get the revelations of massive data collection by the National Security Agency, government employees who lie to Congress with no repercussions, and government investigators, courts and prosecutors operating in secret.

In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed Thompson’s lawsuit against Orleans Parish and the office of former District Attorney Harry Connick (father of the debonair crooner). The court’s decision in Connick v. Thompson added yet another layer of protection for aggressive prosecutors, in this instance by making it more difficult to sue the governments that employ them. It was just the latest in a series of Supreme Court decisions going back to the 1970s that have insulated prosecutors from any real consequences of their actions.

Prosecutors and their advocates say complete and absolute immunity from civil liability is critical to the performance of their jobs. They argue that self-regulation and professional sanctions from state bar associations are sufficient to deter misconduct. Yet there’s little evidence that state bar associations are doing anything to police prosecutors, and numerous studies have shown that those who misbehave are rarely if ever professionally disciplined.

And in a culture where racking up convictions tends to win prosecutors promotions, elevation to higher office and high-paying gigs with white-shoe law firms, civil liberties activists and advocates for criminal justice reform worry there’s no countervailing force to hold overzealous prosecutors to their ethical obligations.

In the end, one of the most powerful positions in public service — a position that carries with it the authority not only to ruin lives, but in many cases the power to end them — is one of the positions most shielded from liability and accountability. And the freedom to push ahead free of consequences has created a zealous conviction culture.

 

[Vastator]

Given all we know about corruption at the highest levels... It’s becoming increasingly difficult to maintain any level of respect for law enforcement, and the criminal justice system.

The more local the LEOs the more you can trust them, to treat your fairly.

Unfortunately that isn’t true. While most of them are decent virtuous folks; their job is to get you into the system. Once they hand you over... Their involvement all but ends. So; unfortunately... they are the persons first point of contact into a corrupt system. Cogs in the machine.

Agreed, but my point is the higher you go up the more likely the prosecutor or DA is a political animal looking to climb up the ladder of power on the backs of innocent people.

But for the man on the street; your first and best chance to avoid abuse at the higher levels of the system; is to avoid, or attack the initial point of contact. Once your cuffed, and stuffed; you’re all but powerless to the system.

Part of the problem outlined in your posts; is the adversarial method of adjudicating our “criminals”. For each of the teams; prosecution, and defense; it becomes almost solely about winning. Justice isn’t even an afterthought. A “good” defense attorney will try his damnedest to get his client off; even if he knows he guilty as hell. Conversely a prosecutor measure his success by how many convictions they can get. Justice isn’t the prime goal of either of these parties in most cases. You have two teams vying for the win; with the defendant being the “ball”...