The Unlawful Prosecution of U.S. Senator Ted Stevens

That’s the subtitle of a new book, Not Guilty, by Rob Cary, one of the lead defense lawyers in the case.

You may remember the garbage prosecution of Ted Stevens from 2008. The case received no shortage of press as it wound its way from indictment to trial to dismissal and, then, to criminal proceedings against the prosecutors who brought it.

You may not know the half of it, however, and if this can happen to him—a decorated veteran who flew 228 combat missions in World War II, a former prosecutor who served forty years in the Senate—then imagine what can happen to you.

After all, a jury voted to convict Stevens on all counts based on little more than the lying testimony of a former friend—a prominent businessman named Bill Allen—who made a dirty deal with the government to deliver the only prize bigger than himself.

How did it happen?

Allen had already been caught bribing state legislators, and he was also under investigation for sexually abusing underage girls, but all of that went away after he testified against Senator Stevens. He served less than two years of a three-year sentence on the bribery charges—when it should have been nine to eleven years and could have been twenty—and he’s never had to answer for the underage girls. He also received immunity for his adult children, more than one of whom was in hot water with him, as well as immunity for his company, which he got to sell for $350 million. The company that bought his company even negotiated a special provision in the contract: it withheld the last $70 million of the purchase price until Allen had completed his “cooperation” with the government.

Also, the jury never received evidence that Allen was lying, even though it existed in spades, because the prosecutors didn’t turn it over. Nor did the jury know that prosecutors purposely suppressed a pile of other evidence in violation of the law. Or that prosecutors selectively redacted a report that they did produce to black out the exculpatory stuff. Or that they purposely ordered 500 gigabytes of discovery produced in the most disorganized way. Or that agents simply wouldn’t write reports or record facts when it suited them.

Here’s how the special, independent prosecutor’s report summed it up in the first sentence:

“The investigation and prosecution of U.S. Senator Ted Stevens were permeated by the systematic concealment of significant exculpatory evidence which would have independently corroborated Senator Stevens’s defense and his testimony, and seriously damaged the testimony and credibility of the government’s key witness.”

In the end, Ted Stevens was cleared but only after a guilty verdict and only because of a small battalion of lawyers, investigators, and staff from a world-class law firm working around the clock to mount a multi-million-dollar defense. Oh, and a surprise whistleblower complaint by an FBI agent who’d seen enough. The government tried to suppress that, too. Here’s what Mr. Cary, the book’s author, had to say about it all:

“The fact remains … that if this can happen to a U.S. Senator in our Nation’s Capital then it can happen to any citizen anywhere in the United States. The fact that we caught them was certainly a product of experience, skill, and aggressive defense work—but it also required luck. And that’s the most frightening thing. If you need luck to ensure justice, then we don’t have much of a system at all.”