WASHINGTON – Legal professors, civil rights advocates and other groups this week urged a federal appeals court in Washington to force the U.S. Department of Justice to publicly disclose a prosecution playbook that was written and distributed after the government botched the case against the late Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens.
The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers sued the Justice Department in 2014 to get a copy of the manual, officially called the Federal Criminal Discovery Blue Book. The group took the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit after a district judge ruled that attorney-client privilege shielded the book. Last week, attorneys for the defense lawyers association filed their opening brief, arguing that disclosure of the manual was necessary to understand how the government responded to the ethics failures in the Stevens case.
