THE STEVENS DISGRACE - AT 8:20 P.M. ET: 

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A seething federal judge dismissed the corruption conviction of former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens on Tuesday and took the rare and serious step of ordering a criminal investigation into prosecutors who poisoned the case.

''In nearly 25 years on the bench, I've never seen anything approaching the mishandling and misconduct that I've seen in this case,'' U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan said.

Sullivan appointed a special prosecutor to investigate Justice Department lawyers who repeatedly withheld evidence from defense attorneys and the judge during the monthlong trial. Stevens was convicted in October of lying on Senate forms about home renovations and gifts he received from wealthy friends.

COMMENT:  The moral of this story is that whenever you give power to government you must watch it carefully.  We law-and-order types must be just as sensitive to prosecutorial misconduct as we are to judges who let the guilty off easily.  We should recall the nightmare of the child-abuse cases in the 1980s, when many innocent people went to jail for "child abuse" that never occurred.  That scandal was exposed by conservative columnist Dorothy Rabinowitz, of The Wall Street Journal.

But I don't know where Senator Stevens goes to get his life back.

April 7, 2009