Defense lawyers in different cases are raising new questions about government prosecutors and potential political biases.By Richard B. Schmitt, Times Staff Writer
6:51 PM PDT, June 17, 2007
<snip>
For months, the Justice Department and Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales have taken political heat for the purge of eight U.S. attorneys last year.
Now the fallout is starting to hit the department in courtrooms around the country.
Defense lawyers in a growing number of cases are raising questions about the motives of government lawyers who have brought charges against their clients. In court papers, they are citing the furor over the U.S. attorney dismissals as evidence that their cases may have been infected by politics.
Justice officials say those concerns are unfounded and constitute desperate measures by desperate defendants. But the affair has given defendants and their lawyers some new energy, which is complicating life for the prosecutors.Missouri lawyers have invoked the controversy in challenging last year's indictment of a company owned by a prominent Democrat, on suspicion of violating federal wage and hour laws. The indictment, which came two months after the owner announced that she was running for political office, was obtained by a Republican U.S. attorney who also has been criticized because he charged workers for a left-leaning political group on the eve of the 2006 midterm election.
The lawyer for an alleged child pornographer recently defended his client at a federal trial in Minnesota in part by questioning the motives of the Republican U.S. attorney, who has come under scrutiny in the congressional investigation into the prosecutor purge.
Lawyers for a former county official in Delaware who has been accused of corruption asked a judge in early May to allow them to subpoena the Justice Department and White House for documents to see whether political motives factored into charges being brought against the official. They cited the brewing controversy inside the Beltway.
"Those revelations dramatically reinforce the reasons to believe that considerations beyond mere law enforcement are behind this prosecution," the lawyers wrote.
The defendant, a once up-and-coming Democrat, was being prosecuted by the U.S. attorney in Wilmington, a Republican appointee.
In an inch-thick response, the U.S. attorney said nothing could be further from the truth, and said the attacks were "sullying the reputations of every prosecutor and law enforcement officer involved in this case," including more than a dozen career prosecutors and agents.
<snip>
Link:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-usattys18jun18,0,5805474.story?coll=la-home-center"He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind..."
:shrug:
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