Prosecutors decline comment on Fawell

Federal prosecutors present and past gave an icy response to word of Scott Fawell's essay criticizing their tactics for persuading witnesses to testify.

"He's entitled to his opinion," said Patrick Collins, who successfully prosecuted George Ryan - with Fawell as a key witness - while a U.S. attorney. Collins is now in private practice at Chicago's Perkins Coie law firm.

"We're not going to comment on it," said Randall Samborn, public information officer for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Chicago.

While Collins recently wrote an op-ed piece allowing, "Federal prosecutors are capable of going too far to win," he generally dismissed Fawell's assertion that Fawell's testimony wasn't necessary to convict Ryan.

In the op-ed piece, Collins wrote that Fawell "was in a position like no one else to present a firsthand account of the case against George Ryan."

Asked to comment, author Scott Turow, a former prosecutor and now a lawyer at Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal, replied via e-mail that the law has "evolved" since his days as a prosecutor, along with prosecutors' ability to compel testimony.

"The contemporary view in the law, whether we are talking about the sentencing guidelines or Fifth Amendment jurisprudence, is that convicted felons have no right to maintain their silence and that in fact it is the obligation of every citizen 'to raise a hue and cry' in the face of crime. So it's not the prosecutors who are deliberately cruel - it's the law," Turow wrote.

"This state of affairs leaves those accused and convicted of crimes with far less personal dignity since you have no choice to keep your mouth shut about people you don't want to implicate," he added. "For those crushed under this great turning wheel, it is a horrible experience, and far worse for white-collar criminals, who generally go from positions of great esteem and power to scorned felons whose brains are being picked clean by prosecutors. The costs are dire, but those who experience this put themselves in that position by committing crimes in the first place."

Turow concluded that he preferred the system as it worked back in his days as a prosecutor, but perhaps that made him old-fashioned - or now just a confirmed defense lawyer.