U.S. attorneys fallout seeps into courts

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-usattys18jun18,0,5805474.story?coll=la-home-center

U.S. attorneys fallout seeps into courts
Defense lawyers in different cases are raising new questions about government prosecutors and potential political biases.
By Richard B. Schmitt, Times Staff Writer
June 18, 2007

WASHINGTON — 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 federal 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.

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justice becomes a joke.

MKJ