Alice Martin was appointed U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama by George W. Bush in Sept. 2001.
http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/aln/attorney.htmlAlthough her DOJ bio lists a number of high profile cases she's brought, nary a mention of the Siegelman prosecution.
Hmmmm
She took over the Siegelman prosecution after U.S. Attorney Leura Canary sorta-kinda 'recused' herself after it became common knowledge that her husbank, Bill Canary, was a 'life-long' repug activist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leura_CanaryAnd now I find this:
A Huntsville contractor won a military contract, and then his trials beganSunday, February 24, 2008
RUSSELL HUBBARD
News staff writer
Like a modern-day Job, Alex Latifi can only sift through the ashes of what was once a prosperous life, and curse those who he says have tormented him without provocation.
The workshops of his Huntsville defense contracting firm, Axion Corp., are empty. His machine tools, humming with government contracts since 1984, are mothballed.
It all began to disappear - the $4 million in annual sales, the 60 employees - in 2003. That's when the U.S. attorney's office for the Northern District of Alabama showed up and accused Latifi, an Iranian-born U.S. citizen, of crimes that included violating the Arms Export Control Act.
His main alleged offense: sending a schematic drawing of the Army's Black Hawk utility helicopter to a prospective subcontractor in China. His main accuser: a disgruntled employee who began informing on him only after she had stolen thousands of dollars and was facing prosecution for forging checks.
After four years of investigation and two raids by federal agents, none of the charges against Axion or Latifi stuck. U.S. District Judge Inge Johnson said the main witness lacked credibility. The Black Hawk drawings Latifi was accused of sending to China weren't marked as classified, and his lawyers argued they were readily available for viewing on the Internet. And the technology is hardly a secret to China, which already owns more than 20 of the freight and troop transporters made by Stratford, Conn.-based Sikorsky Aircraft Corp.
In October, after a seven-day trial in U.S. District Court in Birmingham, the judge dismissed the case. Johnson ruled there was no way federal prosecutors from Alice Martin's U.S. attorney's office in Birmingham, were going to meet their burden of proof in the criminal trial.
"I honestly feel, considering the current situation with Iran, it was directed that an Iranian should not have government contracts, or access to defense information," Latifi said. "They were about to put me in jail for 25 years over this."
http://www.al.com/printer/printer.ssf?/base/news/1203844572280480.xml&coll=2&thispage=1