Illegally Prosecuted
Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice, by Sidney Powell, Dallas, Texas: Brown Books, 436 pages, hardcover.
A skillful prosecutor, it has been said, could indict a ham sandwich. Yet even the ill-fated sandwich might have a better chance at trial than a real defendant when federal prosecutors misrepresent statutes, withhold or distort evidence, and intimidate witnesses, as Sidney Powell has chronicled in Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice. A former federal prosecutor herself, Powell draws on her later experience as an appellate lawyer to describe cases of prosecutorial misconduct leading to, among other things, the destruction of one of the nation’s top five accounting firms, the wrongful conviction of four Merrill Lynch executives, and the unseating of a U.S. senator.
Powell hammers away at prosecutors who withhold or suppress evidence and the judges who let them get away with it. Both the canons of the legal profession and the 1963 Supreme Court decision in Brady v. Maryland require the government in criminal cases to share with defense counsel any evidence favorable to the defendant. In his foreword to Powell’s book, Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, explains the reasoning behind the Brady rule:
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