That's the title of commentary in the latest American Lawyer written by Columbia Law prof Scott Horton. LINK
In March 2007 the U.S. government charged Axion Corp., a small business in Huntsville, Ala., with illegally giving technical drawings for a Blackhawk helicopter part to manufacturers in China. The prosecutors seized Axion's assets and took away its government contract business. The company won an acquittal at trial a year later, but by that time, it was out of business.
Axion is the latest in a string of aggressive prosecutions brought by Birmingham U.S. Attorney Alice Martin. Those prosecutions are marked by convictions overturned and innocent men wronged. Two judges have openly questioned whether she knowingly prosecuted innocent people. The American Lawyer has learned that the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility has opened an investigation into allegations of misconduct that were made by Axion against Martin.
A Mississippi native, Martin was a federal prosecutor in Memphis and an Alabama state court judge. She has strong ties to the Republican establishment -- her mentor is William Canary, a powerful Republican campaign consultant in Alabama who has close ties to former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove.
Her first step into the national spotlight came with the prosecution of a group of HealthSouth Corp. executives on fraud charges starting in 2003. Seventeen corporate officers were convicted, but CEO Richard Scrushy, on whom all eyes had been focused, walked out of court a free man.
And:
But she is best known for her crusade against former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, a Democrat. Martin tried to prosecute Siegelman on corruption charges, but dropped the case the day after the trial began. She then passed the baton to her colleagues in Montgomery, who brought a second, successful case against Siegelman on the basis of allegedly improper campaign donations by Richard Scrushy. An appeal is pending.
The Siegelman prosecution has been widely criticized as a frame-up by Martin, and the prosecution is now the subject of a probe by the House Judiciary Committee, which is trying to determine if it was brought for political reasons.
She most recently gained notoriety for the failed prosecution of Axion, a company started by Alexander Nooredin Latifi, an intense and amiable entrepreneur who emigrated from Iran as a young man in the 1970s. He learned engineering and slowly built the company. At its peak, the business had 60 employees and was estimated by a federal court to be worth $50 million.
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