The Mess in Mississippi: Pregaming the Feds’ Strategy
Dickie’s son, Zach, who’s also indicted in the Lackey situation, has brought in a new lawyer: Todd Graves, who applied for pro hac vice status in the case yesterday. Todd Graves? Name sound familiar? Graves was one of the handful of U.S. attorneys reportedly forced out by DOJ officials. (HT: Prof. Henning of white-collar-crime-prof blog.) He’d served as U.S. Attorney in Kansas City since 2001. He’s now at Graves, Bartle & Marcus. Ah, so fun! It’s days like today that we feel like we know every lawyer in the world!
There are a couple of other questions we didn’t get a chance to address yesterday, however. For starters, we noticed that Scruggs was named in the papers filed alongside Langston’s plea agreement as an unindicted participant in the conspiracy to influence Judge DeLaughter. Now, we don’t consider ourselves experts in criminal procedure or prosecutorial tactics, but this struck us as odd. Doesn’t the government typically refer to alleged unindicted co-conspirators as “John Doe” or, to use a real-life example, Partners A and B? How can the government get away with naming someone as a participant in a conspiracy without naming them also as a defendant?
WSJ Law Blog
1/15/8
Magnolia Tribune
