I posted briefly on the Lauren Stevens acquittal last month, and now I’ve got a longer treatment up at Cato at Liberty:
…U.S. District Court Judge Roger Titus ordered the acquittal of Lauren Stevens, a former in-house lawyer for drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline, who had been charged with obstructing a federal investigation. In strong language, Judge Titus said Stevens “should never have been prosecuted” and that allowing the case to go forward to a jury “would be a miscarriage of justice.” …After the stunning dismissal, the U.S. Department of Justice was quite unapologetic, a top official suggesting that its prosecutors intended to do nothing differently in future.
The full post is here. P.S. Scott Greenfield has some additional thoughts that should not be missed.
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As in the case of the former Secretary of Labor, Ray Donovan, where does Lauren Stevens go to get her reputation back?
The nameless, faceless bureaucratic hacks that perpetrated this travesty should be exposed to shame, if not keelhauled.
The jury in the Martha Stewart case missed the forest for the trees. They started with the presumption that she did something wrong and tried to cover her tracks by lying to the Federal agent. They started with a presumption of guilt! Then they could not grasp that Ms. Stewart got rid of 85,000 of her 90,000 shares; and that she tendered her remaining 5,000 to a tender offer. Roughly 20% of her shares was accepted. That is why she had an odd number of shares when her broker’s assistant recommended that she sell.
She was prosecuted because Ms. Seymore wanted her head. There was no real evidence of Ms. Stewart doing anything wrong. It was a disgusting prosecution, and I am ashamed of my country for it.