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The failure to win conviction on more than one relatively minor charge against former Illinois Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich is the latest setback for the Justice Department in a string of recent public corruption cases.
But the Blagojevich case also illustrates one way that the government has consistently been successful in such prosecutions: winning convictions on the cover-up rather than the underlying crime.
Prosecutors had boasted before the 11-week trial that Blagojevich's "political corruption crime spree" would "make Lincoln roll over in his grave," and snippets of damning wiretapped conversations featuring a foul-mouthed Blagojevich were released by prosecutors and widely reported in the media.
But after two weeks of jury deliberations, the Democrat was convicted Tuesday on only a single count of lying to the FBI.
"If something appears to be a slam dunk case in the media, it is not necessarily a slam dunk case in reality," said Stuart Slotnick, a former prosecutor who now works at the New York firm Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney. "This slam dunk case didn't seem to be a slam dunk case to the jury."
It later emerged that the jury may been only one vote away from convicting Blagojevich of seeking to sell the U.S. Senate seat left vacant by the election of Barack Obama in late 2008. The voting margin on the remaining 22 charges varied, members of the jury told various media outlets Tuesday evening.
While Blagojevich still faces a potential five-year prison sentence and a certain retrial, Tuesday's verdict was at least a temporary victory for the former governor, ousted from office after his 2008 indictment.
And it is also, at least temporarily, a defeat for the Justice Department, which has been dealt several similar blows in corruption cases - most notably, apparent Justice Department misconduct in the 2008 prosecution of Sen. Ted Stevens, Alaska Republican, who was killed in a plane crash last week.
In that case, Stevens had been convicted of seven felony counts stemming from gifts and home renovations he did not report on financial-disclosure forms. The Senate's longest-serving Republican, holding his seat for 40 years, he lost a re-election battle a month after his convictions.
But in light of revelations that the prosecution team withheld evidence that could have possibly bolstered Mr. Stevens' defense, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. took the extraordinary step of asking a judge to throw out the conviction.
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