Case against Edwards 'lousy' from the get-go
The government's case against John Edwards seemed open and shut: The disgraced former presidential candidate must be guilty of something for using a wealthy donor's six-figure checks to hide a mistress and a love child during the 2008 presidential campaign.
This week, a jury decided the opposite, concluding in interviews after deadlocking on most of the charges that "the evidence wasn't there" to convict the former senator and once-favored Democratic presidential candidate, on six counts of election fraud. The jury returned a not guilty verdict on the key charge and deadlocked on the other five.
While the Department of Justice's Public Integrity Section, which helped prosecute the Edwards case along with a team of North Carolina lawyers, wins far more cases than it loses, the collapse of the Edwards case hits particularly hard, with questions being raised about why the government brought what some legal analysts say was "a lousy case" in the first place.
"I think it's a very difficult area in the law, and there was just so much background noise in this case, such difficult witness issues, that it's frankly not surprising to me that this is where they ended up," says Peter Zeidenberg, a former Public Integrity Section prosecutor who works for white-collar defendants in Washington.
In announcing charges last year, Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer came out swinging, declaring the case was about "campaign integrity." By most accounts, prosecutors handled the long, complex trial with aplomb and professionalism, helped along by favorable rulings from Judge Catherine Eagles. And more generally, the difference between a foolish exercise of discretion in bringing a losing case and a conviction on the part of courageous prosecutors can be whisper-thin even in the best of cases.
But for campaign investigators reeling from the fallout from the botched prosecution of the late Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, in which a judge threw out a guilty verdict upon finding out that the government withheld exculpatory evidence, the rubble of the Edwards verdict holds some key lessons, legal analysts say.
For one thing, jurors were among the victims -- in other words, defrauded voters. "If the public is the victim, then the jurors are victims, too, and they could basically say, 'I don't care, that happened three, four, five years ago,' " Zeidenberg says.
The prosecution was faced with using vague laws -- though the alleged crimes happened in 2008, the jury was deciding Edwards' guilt after the landmark 2010 Citizens United case, in which the Supreme Court equated cash with free speech. Had the scenario played out this year, the transfer of funds may not have been even close to illegal.
Moreover, to many Americans, even those disgusted by Edwards' actions, the prosecution seemed like overkill. Edwards was no longer a politician, and his career and family have paid a high price for his infidelities, indiscretions and, as he said, "sins." "Disgraced" has been among the softer adjectives used to describe him, "scoundrel" among the gentler nouns.
But he was still a guy in a suit in a courtroom, who declared, surrounded by his family after the verdict, that he, and he alone, bore responsibility for what he had done.
Zeidenberg, the former prosecutor, says the most obvious cautionary tale is the appearance that politics played a role in the prosecution.
The main investigator, a North Carolina Republican named George Holding, left the case immediately after charges were announced to run for Congress -- a move that Zeidenberg says failed to raise enough eyebrows. And chief prosecutor, Breuer, a Democrat, had his own political considerations: If he didn't proceed, he might be perceived as protecting a fellow Democrat.
Once the trial got under way, the prosecution caught every break, with the judge agreeing to motions to suppress key defense testimony and giving the jury a wide berth in assigning guilt to Edwards.
But prosecutors had to contend with a shaky star witness, former Edwards aide Andrew Young, who wrote a tell-all about the whole affair, proferred an alleged sex tape and ended up using some of the money to build a fancy home.
"I think the credibility of the witness was something that was of utmost importance to us," jury foreman David Recchion said.
The Edwards trial was decidedly high-profile and high-stakes and can be held up by the Department of Justice as a model for what can happen if a candidate attempts campaign finance shenanigans. And few Americans really want prosecutors to be shy about pursuing miscreants just because there are some weaknesses in the case.
