Just now on Fox News, Patrick Fitzgerald has announced that no more prosecutions will be forthcoming. It strikes me that Lewis Libby has been caught in the cross-hairs of two incredibly unfortunate phenomena: a politicized trial, coupled with the kind of “mental intent” case that depends on inherently unverifiable determinations of credibility. The jury chose to believe Tim Russert and Matt Cooper over Lewis Libby when the evidence conflicted — a determination that may have been made in absolute good faith, but is also somewhat foreseeable in a city as heavily Democratic as the District of Columbia. What’s likewise unfortunate is that such jury determinations about credibility are almost never overturned on appeal. The whole thing strikes me as one more object lesson in the scary miscarriages of justice that can occur in a legal system when there are prosecutors who are overzealous rather than judicious.
