Federal Prosecutors Feeling the Heat

Persons practicing in the White Collar Crime area, including the federal tax crime area, have viewed with great interest the recent mutiple missteps by federal prosecutors in major criminal prosecutions. In the tax area, we were treated to the KPMG prosecution where the Government forced KPMG to quit paying attorneys fees and suffered the dismissal of 13 defendants when the Judge called foul. It was bad enough that the Government had engaged in that sort of extortion, but worse when the prosecutors dissembled about it in trying to get the judge to avoid looking into the sordid conduct. Happenings of the same genre -- convict at any cost -- seem to keep surfacing. E.g., the whole Senator Stevens prosecution involving the prosecutors' Brady disclosure violations among other footfaults. Today's Wall Street Journal has an interesting article here on the abuses in the disclosure area and how to mitigate them.