SEAFOOD.COM NEWS [Seafoodnews.com] — April 10, 2013 –Senator Lisa Murkowski today responded to the news that an administrative judge has overturned the suspensions of two prosecutors in the ethics case against Senator Ted Stevens – deciding that the Department of Justice had gone against internal procedure in its punishment of the two attorneys in question, by saying:
"The Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) decision to overturn the suspensions of prosecutors' misconduct in Senator Ted Stevens' case teaches us nothing we didn't already know: the Department of Justice's prosecutorial misconduct oversight was a mess before the US District Court Judge who handled the Stevens case and his independent master found misconduct and remains a mess today. Hard as it may be to fathom, the MSPB's ruling has only made a bad system worse – since we now realize that DoJ leadership may not understand their own internal rules.
"All Alaskans need to know is that this decision has nothing to do with the merits of the case against the prosecutors and their behavior; it focuses solely on an ambiguous internal rule about how punishment inside the Justice Department is meted out – a rule that different offices within the Justice Department clearly don't understand or agree upon."
Earlier this week, an administrative judge overturned the suspensions of two federal prosecutors that the Justice Dept. had tried to discipline for misconduct due to failing to turn over evidence that might have helped the defense in the aggressive corruption trial against Senator Ted Stevens.
Last year, the department found that the two prosecutors had engaged in reckless – though not intentional – professional misconduct and ordered them to be suspended without pay. One, Joseph Bottini, was suspended for 40 days, and the other, James Goeke, was suspended for 15 days.
The legal team that defended Mr. Stevens, Republican of Alaska, called those suspensions “pathetic” and inadequate, saying the department had “demonstrated conclusively that it is not capable of disciplining its prosecutors.”
After the trial, it emerged that prosecutors had failed to disclose information, like conflicting statements by witnesses, that might have helped Mr. Stevens win acquittal. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. later asked the trial judge to throw out the conviction. Mr. Stevens died in a 2010 plane crash.
But the two prosecutors contended that the discipline was too severe and appealed to the federal Merit Systems Protection Board, an agency that hears disciplinary cases involving career civil servants in the federal government.
This article originally appeared on Seafood.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.