Previous misconduct by Stevens Prosecutor.

Ted Stevens.

A judge has dismissed charges against former Sen. Ted Stevens because of prosecutorial misconduct and has ordered a criminal contempt investigation of the prosecutors.

"In nearly 25 years on the bench, I've never seen anything approaching the mishandling and misconduct that I've seen in this case," U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan said during the ruling.

Those facing the criminal probe are the lead prosecutor Brenda Morris, the department's No. 2 corruption official, Public Integrity prosecutors Nicholas Marsh and Edward Sullivan, and Alaska federal prosecutors Joseph Bottini and James Goeke, and William Welch.

Brenda Morris appears to have previous form in this type of misconduct in Texas some years ago, in the Allan Brown case. Not only did the jury find Brown not guilty in less than an hour, but Brown sued and the government settled for 1.34 million dollars.

Some folks in Austin and San Antonio were likely not terribly surprised last week when Attorney General Eric Holder announced he would ask a federal judge to throw out the conviction of former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens on corruption charges because of the misconduct of Justice Department prosecutors.

Brenda K. Morris, principal deputy chief of the Justice Department’s so-called Public Integrity Section, showed the same regard for legal ethics here.

The federal judge in the Stevens case held her and several of her subordinates in contempt of court and called their behavior “outrageous.”

A San Antonio federal judge expressed similar feelings about Morris and her team seven years ago.

The feds had obtained a search warrant to search the office and home of criminal defense attorney Alan Brown for evidence of tax cheating and money laundering, but U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia ruled the search to be unconstitutional and barred prosecutors from using what they had collected.

In seeking the search warrant, Garcia ruled, investigators misled a U.S. magistrate by failing to disclose that their primary source, a former office manager for Brown named Kelly Houston, had fallen in love with one of Brown’s clients, a drug trafficker whose 18-year federal sentence she hoped to get reduced by turning on Brown. …(Houston Chronicle)

I have fairly strong misgivings as to the integrity of Ted Stevens, however this whole debacle does nothing but cause a lack of confidence in the justice system, while at the same time not really reassuring us that Stephens is innocent. The one thing that the public can have confidence in is that there are some investigators out there who are prepared to call a stop to these actions. Otherwise it reads like the script of a bad movie.

According to Alaska Dispatch, the judge in the ‘Brown’ case has strong feelings as to how the matter should be dealt with:

"This is a prosecutor who needs to be removed, and I would hope the attorney general utilizes the same test of integrity as he did in the Stevens case," said U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia, who ruled against Morris in Brown's case. "Though (the Brown case) is several years old, there is no statute of limitations on integrity."