Why Are Prosecutors Striking Out?

By MAUREEN DOWD
NYT

WASHINGTON

WHEN it comes to throwing a little chin music, even the Rocket himself could learn something from Judge Reggie Walton.

The man is fierce.

In a season when a bunch of high-profile prosecutions have slipped on banana peels, the 62-year-old United States District Court judge is an ace.

Shakespeare proposed killing all the lawyers. But lately government lawyers have been busy killing their own cases, acting like fumbling farm teams at the show. The latest prosecutorial implosion took place in federal court here on Thursday. Justice Department lawyers spent millions in these penurious times preparing a case with 45 witnesses against Roger Clemens, charging him with lying to Congress about using steroids and human growth hormone.

But the trial had barely begun when those lawyers made what Tom Boswell, the Washington Post sports sage, called “the most shocking, inexplicable error in modern baseball history.” An error, Boswell said, that would cause the sports world and the legal community to “oscillate between pity and ridicule, incredulity and laughter, for years.”

(More here.)