Legal News

Ted Stevens Found Guilty: Should He Have Testified?

By Dan Slater

Just in: Senator Ted Stevens was found guilty on seven counts of lying on Senate financial documents. Stevens, 84, faced charges that he accepted and failed to report more than $250,000 in gifts. Here’s the WSJ report.

To get some early perspective on the verdict, we spoke with McKee Nelson’s Michael Levy in D.C. Prior to joining McKee, where he runs the firm’s white collar practice, Levy (Yale, Harvard law) was an AUSA in the District of Columbia for four years.

“Stevens’ decision to testify was the turning point,” Levy told the Law Blog. “When the defendant testifies then that testimony becomes the focal point. Instead of the government having the burden of proving its case beyond a reasonable doubt, the jury inevitably starts thinking about the case in terms of whether they believed the defendant. So here, instead of going back to the jury room thinking about whether what [VECO founder] Bill Allen said was credible they went back and thought about whether Ted Stevens was credible. And apparently they decided he wasn’t.”

So should Williams & Connolly’s Brendan Sullivan have tried to keep Stevens off the stand? That would’ve been hard, Levy said.

“The decision to testify is the defendant’s decision,” he emphasized. “And whenever you’re representing a successful, high-profile individual — whether it’s a member of Congress, a high-ranking member of the executive branch or a corporate CEO — you’re talking about someone who often has strong beliefs, and has generally achieved success because they’ve been persuasive throughout a number of situations and through a number of years.” (Levy might know. As a young Skadden associate in the early 90’s, he helped defend Caspar Weinberger in the Iran-Contra scandal.) Levy continued: “Ted Stevens has won reelection throughout four decades. Trying to persuade him not to make the most important political appearance of his life was not the easiest thing to do, even assuming that was the strategy that Sullivan wanted to follow.”

A call to Brendan Sullivan was not immediately returned.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on October 27, 2008 (boomark / email).