SHELNUTT CASE ENDS IN ACQUITTAL

A high-profile, multiple-count criminal trial that sought to
implicitly link a Columbus lawyer to the biggest drug bust in local
history ended Wednesday afternoon with a resounding thud.

Attorney Mark Shelnutt, indicted on 40 federal felony charges and
tried on 36 of them, was found not guilty on all counts. Thus did a
jury implicitly vindicate Shelnutt's claim that his only connection
with the Torrance Hill drug operation was that of a lawyer
representing a client.

Also vindicated was the principle that the burden of proof in a
criminal trial in this country rests, as it must, with the accuser,
and that the presumption of innocence is to be considered a given
until and unless the evidence establishes otherwise beyond a
reasonable doubt.

The "reasonableness" of doubt about the case against Shelnutt might
have been a matter of debate, but the fact of it clearly was not.
Indeed, to hear the reaction of some in the local legal community, the
impression is not so much that the defense won this case as that the
prosecution lost it -- or never had much of one to begin with.

More than one Columbus attorney cited a recent ruling that an attorney
is not guilty of money laundering simply for accepting ill-gotten cash
for a fee, because the Constitution protects "any transaction
necessary to preserve a person's right to representation" as a
criminal defendant.

Both Page Pate, of the local district attorney's office, and Frank
Martin, local defense attorney and former mayor, expressed obvious
surprise that the government still included money laundering in its
long list of charges: "Perhaps they should have stepped back and tried
to evaluate whether or not they really had as strong a case as they
thought they had," Martin said, "... but they didn't seem deterred by
that.

Well-known Columbus attorney Richard Hagler expressed another widely
held impression, namely that the government had "overcharged" Shelnutt
- -- hitting him with a barrage of counts in the hope that some would
stick one way or another: "I think it cheapened any counts that might
have had some legitimacy to them." Pate agreed: "... If the jury doesn't
believe the big charges, they're much less likely to believe the
little charges. You lose credibility."

Such a tactic also suggests the kind of scattergun approach sometimes
seen in civil suits -- suing for $50 million in the hope of getting a
defendant to settle for $500,000. If a jury senses the government is
using the sheer weight of an indictment to browbeat the defense into a
plea -- especially if the case is perceived as weak on its merits -- the
attempt can backfire.

Whether that happened in this case is something only the jurors can
say for sure. What we do know is that 12 citizens carried the
presumption of Mark Shelnutt's innocence into the jury box with them,
and the government failed to convince them that presumption was wrong.