I did attend the three political corruption trials in Anchorage and have some thoughts on the prosecutors and their intentions and abilities.

The prosecutors had two active attorneys in each case in Anchorage, but there were four who were actively involved in all three cases.

Joseph Bottini has been an Anchorage US attorney for about 20 years. He has been so involved in all this that he had every fact at the tip of his tongue and knew the relevance of any point or issue made and could respond immediately to anything. There was a tinge of righteousness in his tone at times, but it was never overbearing (well probably it was to the defendants) and often well-deserved. He worked closely with the FBI on developing this case.

Nicolas Marsh is probably in his 30s and I’ve heard that the rest of the team thought of him as ‘the brain.’ He’s a DC based attorney from of Public Integrity Section of DOJ. His knowledge of the law and the cases was scary. Marsh was the wonk of the team (he reminded me of Tobey Maguire as Spiderman’s alter ego Peter Parker), and he could be a little mechanical in an opening or closing, but he was also an active and effective member of the team, and got better at talking to the jury as time went by.

Jim Goeke was the other Alaskan Office US attorney involved. He could have been one of the Blues Brothers. Young and brash, he also had a complete grasp of all the facts, but sometimes had to pull back a bit in his aggressiveness.

Edward Sullivan was the second DC Public Integrity Section attorney. Young and a little shakey in his first time addressing the jury, he got over that quickly.

All four of members of this team – but particularly the first three – impressed me as completely on top of the law and of the case and totally committed to getting convictions. It’s absolutely unthinkable to me that any of these guys would have done anything to sabotage this conviction.

Another key person is Mary Beth Kepner. She looks like this sweet young woman who could be invisible in a crowd, but she’s the FBI agent who initiated the whole investigation and worked closely with all the informants and was at the table right behind the attorneys in all the trials. Other Alaska FBI agents were highly skeptical of her operation of first, but hold her in very high regard now.

In a recent post on my blog, I mused about what was different about the Stevens case that could account for the bungling.

1. The venue. This wasn’t Alaskan jurors, most of whom, have had Uncle Ted as their senior US senator all their lives and who fly in and out of the Ted Stevens International Airport and have absorbed the Ted Stevens larger than life benefactor of all Alaskans narrative. This was a jury of skeptical Washington DC residents – mostly African-American women.

2. The new head of the prosecution team - Brenda Morris – the deputy of the Public Integrity Section, a DC native, and African-American woman. I did not travel to DC for the trial (but I’ve heard from several people who did.) Was she on the case because of her expertise in this kind of trial (which her resume says she has) or because she was an African-American woman (to counter all those white male attorneys who’d been handling the cases up til now)? My guess is probably both those reasons. Had she been keeping up with all the details of the earlier cases? How well did the old team take to the new boss? There are lots of questions here.

3. The defense team was headed by one of the best and most expensive in the country and there was plenty of staff to help out. The Anchorage defendants had one attorney each – two in one case. The overwhelming imbalance became obvious when the defense attorney had to get up and leave the defendant sitting alone while he went out of the courtroom to get his witnesses. The prosecutors had 15-30 people swarming in and around the courtroom. Their offices were down the hall and they wheeled in a cart full of thick notebooks everyday. So this defense team seemed, from here, to be a little better match. But even so, in the Anchorage trials there were thousands of hours of audio and video tape to review and the Stevens trial was on the fast track.

4. And finally there was the judge. In Anchorage, the local US Attorneys (and the defense attorneys) work closely with the judge all the time. (Though the Kohring case had an imported Seattle attorney – John Henry Browne – who acted like the big city attorney coming in to show the small town guys how to do things and he was totally ridiculous in that act, and outclassed by the Prosecutors.) How did all that familiarity affect the trials? The local defense attorneys worked much less combatively with the judge and the Prosecutors than did Browne. Was it just they knew each other and trusted each other? Or were they considering they’d be facing this same judge in other cases? Did the civility help their case or keep them from challenging more aggressively? At the time (remember, these were my first times in a federal courtroom for a trial) I thought the judge was pretty low key, interested more in making sure the facts got out and doing things with practical efficiency than worrying about dotting all the i’s and crossing the t’s. He wasn’t cutting corners, he just wasn’t hung up on the letter of the law if it obstructed the spirit of the law. He called out the prosecutors as well as the defense attorneys, but with more amused annoyance than with anger. He knew they were doing what they could for their cases and appreciated that, and didn’t get upset. He just called them on it, like a referee calling fouls. But in hindsight, it does seem – particularly by his comments about the sentencing guidelines about the seriousness of public officials violating the public trust and thinking through the fact the he too is part of the justice department – there may have been a little bias for the prosecutors. The DC judge apparently wasn’t low key and strongly chastised the prosecutors with a lot more emotion. Was he really that angry? Was he trying to show his impartiality in case there was an appeal? I have no idea.

In any case, given how well organized the prosecutors were in Anchorage and given the justice department’s record under Bush – so well chronicled on this site – I couldn’t help also wondering if someone on the prosecution in DC had intentionally tried to scuttle things. But I’d bet a ton of money that it wasn’t one of the four prosecutors who worked on the trials in Anchorage last year.

As I looked toward the verdict, it appeared to me that the jury, the tapes, and Stevens’ demeanor in the cross examination were key factors that would probably convict him. This DC jury wasn’t going to be awed by the Uncle Ted aura. Just the opposite was probably going to be the case. He was part of the establishment that has kept DC without real representation in Congress.

In the Anchorage trials, the juries all said the tapes played a key role. These are hard to prove cases – the word of an informant versus the word of an elected official. But when the juries heard the defendants’ own words on tape, the doubts were dispelled. When they heard Stevens saying “The worst that will happen is a fine or some prison time” I think that undercut everything else presented on his behalf.

Finally, when Stevens treated Prosecutor Brenda Morris with disrespect and condescension in the cross examination I couldn’t help but think, the jury has lots of African-American women on it. Watching the female African-American prosecutor treated this way by this old white man isn’t going to endear them to Uncle Ted.

That said, I respect EW and BMAZ very much. You are both inspirations for thoughtful bloggers and I respect BMAZ’s concerns. The rule of law is all that stands between us a tyranny. Ted Stevens getting off because of improper procedures on the part of the prosecutors would be unfortunate, but not nearly as problematic as letting prosecutors get away such actions. I’m not in a position to evaluate whether there were enough compensating factors to overcome the problems raised by the infractions. But Stevens cannot claim his defense team wasn’t as good as he could hope to get and they should have been able to make his case effectively. That leaves any lingering problems with the judgment of Judge Sullivan.

I’m also concerned that the convictions of corrupt politicians causes undue joy among their opponents. While it’s reasonable to be happy that justice has occurred, gloating over the fall of someone like Ted Stevens disturbs me. This is an older man who may have lost some of his capacity to make good judgments. But it also absolves the rest of us (most FDL readers probably excepted) for not working harder to dismantle the systems that put our elected officials into a world of sycophants who build their egos the way Stevens’ was built. And the lobbyists who do everything they can to make ambiguous the lines between friendship and professional advocacy so that people like Stevens get caught up in things like this. I say that, knowing that this was probably the least of the things that the FBI is trying to prove against Stevens. Apparently the smoking guns that would be needed on fisheries legislation, on sweetheart deals for ex-staffers as with the Alaska Sealife Center, seem to be eluding the prosecutors and so they went with this case they felt they could win.

Call it the INHERENT RIGHT TO JUSTICE ACT of 2009.

‘Twas, obviously, meant for Leen @ 113.

;~D

I wonder how many of our fellow citizens are in the same, precarious, and leaky, boat?

Actually, such was the point of my comment @ 45.

The University of South Carolina has a law school too, ya know …

an I coulda got a regency law school grad to question my competence for half that …

Alaska law prohibits convicted felons … from knowingly possessing a concealed or concealable firearm. Section 11.61.200(a)(1), (12).

http://www.lcav.org/states/alaska.asp

Too bad about your luck there Ted.