Not guilty isn't the same as innocent, sorry

Rico says it's a standard tactic by defense lawyers, but it ain't gonna work in the case of Ted Stevens; Neil Lewis has an article in The New York Times about it all:

When a federal trial judge tossed out the ethics conviction of former Senator Ted Stevens last week, his lawyers promulgated the story of an innocent man victimized by unscrupulous prosecutors. But the five-week trial of Mr. Stevens offered a different version of him, and only a discrete part of that was directly affected by the discovery of repeated instances of prosecutorial misconduct.
The disclosures that prosecutors had withheld information from the defense did little to erase much of the evidence that Mr. Stevens, who had been a powerful and admired political figure in Alaska, regularly and willingly accepted valuable gifts from friends and favor-seekers that he did not report.
The reasons for the dismissal of the case do not, for example, have any bearing on undisputed testimony that a Stevens friend, Bob Persons, bought an expensive massage chair for the senator and had it delivered to his Washington home. When Mr. Stevens told Mr. Persons he could not accept the chair as a gift because of ethics restrictions, they both then agreed to deem the chair a loan. It has remained on loan at his home for seven years, according to testimony. Correspondence from Mr. Stevens produced at the trial showed that he greatly liked the chair and often fell asleep in it.
The government’s mistakes were serious and have alarmed lawyers who say it is fitting that several prosecutors are themselves now the subject of ethics investigations. The prosecutors failed to disclose information that defense lawyers could have used at the trial to bolster their case that Mr. Stevens did not intentionally conceal the receipt of gifts and services.
Mr. Stevens, who became the longest-serving Republican in Senate history, was convicted in October of seven counts of willfully failing to list gifts and services on Senate disclosure forms.
The dismissal of the charges, a victory for Mr. Stevens and his lawyers, raises the question of what it means to say that someone is innocent. Mr. Stevens is certainly innocent in the civics-book sense that everyone is innocent in the eyes of the law until and unless proved guilty. But lawyers point out that such a definition is part of the legal construct in which the burden of proving guilt falls on the government.
Mr. Stevens’s chief lawyer, Brendan Sullivan, said of his client: “His name is cleared. He is innocent of the charges as if they had never been brought.”
Professor Joshua Dressler of the Ohio State University law school said, however, that the failure to be convicted in a criminal trial does not, by itself, confer innocence on someone. “The decision by the judge to dismiss the case is certainly not a statement that the defendant is innocent,” Professor Dressler said, “but that the prosecutors didn’t play by the rules, and for that reason alone we have to use this strong remedy” to deter other prosecutors from similar misbehavior.
In fact, two jurors have said that the dismissal of the case because of the prosecutors’ actions did not make Mr. Stevens innocent in their view. Brian Kirst, an alternate juror in the trial, said the prosecutors’ problems had nothing to do with much of the testimony that mattered to him. “I mean he had the chair,” said Mr. Kirst, a professional photographer. He said he was strongly leaning toward conviction— though he did not participate in the verdict because he was randomly deemed an alternate— because he believed that the defense had done little to rebut the basic accusations that Mr. Stevens had been given lots of gifts and never reported them. Colleen Walsh, one of the jurors who convicted Mr. Stevens, said on her personal blog of the trial’s collapse: “The only thing this proves is that the prosecution messed everything up.” Ms. Walsh, a church secretary, wrote on the blog as if speaking to Mr. Stevens, saying: “You may be innocent on corruption charges which were never brought up. But you are still guilty of not disclosing some of your major gifts to the public.”
Most of the prosecutors’ mistakes involved the handling of Bill Allen, a chief witness against Mr. Stevens. The government said Allen provided some $250,000 worth of goods and services to upgrade the senator’s Alaska residence. Prosecutors failed to provide defense lawyers with interview notes in which Mr. Allen told them that he believed Mr. Stevens would have paid for things if he had been sent a bill and that the renovations were worth only about $80,000. More importantly, prosecutors did not disclose that Mr. Allen did not recall in early interviews something he later testified about at trial— that he had been told by a Stevens emissary that Mr. Stevens did not want a bill and only asked for one to cover himself. Mr. Sullivan, the defense lawyer, said he would have used that fact to demonstrate that Mr. Allen had made up that story later to bolster his accusations.

Rico says that, legal quibbling aside, it's pretty obvious Stevens liked free stuff and didn't like to report it. At least this killed his political career...