A former D.C. prosecutor accused of ethics violations for authorizing payments to informants in a series of murder cases in the mid 1990’s may be disbarred for his conduct.
According to a report by USA Today, regulators have asked the D.C. Court of Appeals to take away former assistant U.S. attorney G. Paul Howes’ law license. If the Court does so, it will be the first time a prosecutor will have been disbarred in more than a decade, USA Today reports.
Tuesday’s hearing came 15 years after Howes was first accused of misusing thousands of dollars of witness vouchers in high-profile homicide cases here. The vouchers are supposed to be used to reimburse witnesses for costs associated with testifying in court, but Howes authorized payments to relatives and girlfriends of informants, an internal Justice Department investigation found. The informants helped him in an investigation of a gang implicated in a series of murders in a neighborhood 3 miles from the White House.
The Washington Post reported in 2007 that those vouchers totaled $75,000, paid out over several months.
The payments to girlfriends and other “witnesses” who in the end never testified were adding up to some substantial amounts, and Howes weighed whether he should alert the judge. When a witness, or a relative of the witness, receives a benefit of any substance in connection with testimony in a case, the prosecutor typically has to disclose the benefit, so the witness’s credibility can be judged.
Howes was worried that he would be ordered to make just such a disclosure — names and all, he testified. A witness in the case had been killed, another had nearly been killed, and he was worried the same fate could strike others, he said.
