We all know presidential candidate, former Senator John Edwards, had an affair with self-styled avant-garde film-maker, Rielle Hunter, that they made a baby while Edwards’ wife was battling cancer, that Edwards first denied it was his child, that Edwards’ loyal friend, Andy Young, said it was his, and, finally, Edwards admitted, yeah, that’s my child. Thus have we removed all doubt that Edwards is a despicable human being
But was any of this a crime? More to the point, was it a federal campaign violation because monies were received and spent to hide this affair and the Hunter love child? In order to be a campaign funding violation, according to the law, the money had to be given “for the purposes of influencing any election for federal office.” In addition, Edwards had to know it was a violation and intend to violate the campaign finance laws. He had to act “knowingly and willfully” to be convicted of such a crime.
In Edwards’ favor, the Federal Election Commission (FEC), when they reviewed Edwards’ campaign filings, didn’t require that these funds dedicated to covering up the affair be reported in the campaign filings as campaign contributions.
The North Carolina federal jury heard the government’s evidence at Edwards’ trial and heard federal judge Catherine Eagles’ instructions on the law and the jury outright acquitted Edwards on one count of receiving illegal campaign contributions, and hung on the other charges, tilted, according to press reports, toward Edwards’ innocence of all charges, prompting Justice Department sources to say that there won’t be another trial. Truth is, there never should have been a first trial.
Nor is this debacle an exceptional case of federal prosecutors over-reaching beyond the facts and the law compromising the justice system’s claim to being fundamentally fair.
Another example of a federal prosecution gone awry, in Florida, five-month old, Sabrina Aisenberg, was kidnapped and the federal prosecutor indicted Sabrina’s parents on secret tape recordings that the prosecution claimed showed that the parents had kidnapped the child.
The grand jury was told these statements were overheard on the tapes. But, in truth and fact, there was no such statements on any of the tape recordings. The court later found the probable cause to make these recordings was bogus as well. The government was forced to drop the case because there was no evidence and the Judge awarded $1.5 million in legal fees to the Aisenberg family lawyers.
As for the federal prosecutor, the Just Us Department suspended the responsible prosecutor for two days (a Saturday and a Sunday). No, he wasn’t fired. He was permitted to join another federal prosecutor’s office in Florida. The family thought they had a slam dunk civil rights action; the court told them, however, that the prosecutor enjoyed immunity and dismissed the suit.
Earlier this year, the Justice Department admitted that its federal prosecutors engaged in misconduct in their prosecution of Senator Ted Stevens when they withheld vital evidence that “seriously damaged the testimony and credibility of the government’s key witness.” This all came to light afterwards. In the meantime, Stevens was convicted, lost his re-election, and then afterwards his conviction was vacated for the government’s misconduct.
To show that this is not just a few random instances of misconduct, USA Today conducted an in depth survey and found 201 federal cases across the nation involving prosecutorial misconduct punished by the court – prosecutorial abuses that put innocent people in jail, and others that prompted the court to let some who may have been guilty go free - http://projects.usatoday.com/news/2010/justice/cases/.
The power of a federal prosecutor is enormous. The filing of an indictment naming anyone is a personal catastrophe – no matter what happens afterwards to the Accused. We can’t afford to have prosecutors undermining the law by breaking the law themselves. I know I was a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York at a time when we believed that constitutional rights were the rules of the road and any crime had to be construed strictly and could not be charged to scare someone into pleading to something else. But more and more, prosecutors treat these powers recklessly. This gross prosecutorial misconduct will not stop while prosecutors enjoy immunity from prosecution themselves, and are hardly ever disciplined or even criticized when they do wrong.
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