Last November, Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the Federal District Court in Washington said that an investigation he ordered into prosecutorial misconduct in the case involving the late Senator Ted Stevens had found "systematic concealment of significant exculpatory evidence".
Mr. Klein has now announced his intention to resign, after compiling a formidable prosecutorial record that included the order to break up the Microsoft Corporation, the dissolution of a global vitamin cartel and the compilation of a list of proposed corporate mergers that were abandoned or restructured after the government's antitrust objections.
By the end of the weekend, even those who did not wish the nomination well had come to feel the same way, for the hearings became a political free-for all, in which senators demonstrated a willingness to stoop to anything, from cheap prosecutorial trickery to outright smears, in order to impeach witnesses whose evidence served the cause of the other side.
Legal ethics and common sense tell us that prosecutorial public restraint is critical in order to help ensure that a defendant receives a fair trial.
In 1996 the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reversed his second conviction and ordered another trial, saying that "prosecutorial and police misconduct has tainted this entire matter from the outset".
The continuities existed because of a consensus in the law-enforcement, intelligence, and prosecutorial agencies regarding the tools they wanted in order to conduct the war on terror.
Last year, citing a "grave miscarriage of justice" by the Commonwealth, a federal judge ruled Dennis was wrongfully convicted of murder, amid prosecutorial and police misconduct and questionable evidence, and ordered him released or retried.
A senior immigration official said her defiance of the final removal order would weigh against her in consideration of prosecutorial discretion, but that her child would be considered a factor in her favor, because deporting her would cause a hardship to an American citizen.
While Tureen and his colleagues agreed that a court would be hesitant to order such litigation due to the doctrine of prosecutorial discretion, they believed that, in light of the impending statute of limitations, a court might order the federal government to simply file the lawsuit as an exercise of the court's common law power to preserve its jurisdiction.
Mr. Ashcroft's orders are a triumph of ideology over good prosecutorial practice.
