Justice scandal hits court cases

Justice scandal hits court cases
By Richard B. Schmitt
Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune
Published June 18, 2007

WASHINGTON -- For months, the Justice Department and Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales have taken political heat for the firings of nine U.S. attorneys last year.

Now the fallout is starting to hit the department in courtrooms across 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, too, may have been infected by politics.

Justice officials say those concerns are unfounded and constitute desperate measures by desperate defendants.

Missouri lawyers have invoked the scandal in challenging last year's indictment of a company, owned by a prominent Democrat, for violating federal wage and hour laws. The indictment came two months after the owner announced that she was running for political office.

The lawyer for an accused child pornographer recently defended his client at a trial in federal court in Minnesota in part by raising questions about the motives of the Republican U.S. attorney, whose tenure has come under scrutiny as part of the congressional investigation into the prosecutor purge.

The firings controversy "provides defendants an opportunity to make an argument that would not have been made two years ago," said Daniel French, a former U.S. attorney in Albany, N.Y. "It has a tremendously corrosive effect."

Lawyer Daniel Gerdts won an acquittal in federal court in Minneapolis last month for a New York computer consultant who had been accused of bringing child pornography into the United States.

In court, Gerdts alluded to published reports of upheaval in the office since Rachel.