Huge and well-deserved victory for our own David O. Markus as Judge Gold drops a bomb on Alex Acosta's office:

The judge reprimanded the two trial prosecutors, saying that along with Drug Enforcement Administration agent Christopher Wells, they “acted vexatiously and in bad faith” in prosecuting Dr. Ali Shaygan. Also reprimanded was assistant U.S. Attorney Karen Gilbert, the narcotics section chief.

Gold called the secret taping of phone calls to Shaygan’s attorney and defense investigator by two informants was “profoundly disturbing.” He raised the specter of the recent dismissal of a conviction against former U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, because prosecutors in that case withheld key evidence.

The $601,795 covers court fees and lawyer costs dating from a superseding indictment filed by prosecutors in September.

“The order speaks for itself. We regret that any of this ever happened in the first place but we are grateful that Judge Gold took it seriously and did the right thing,” said Miami criminal defense attorney David O. Markus, the lead counsel for Shaygan. “Thank goodness that the conduct did not distract the jury from finding Dr. Shaygan not guilty of all 141 counts against him.

Miami attorneys Marc Seitles and Robin Kaplan served as co-counsels for the defense.

You can read the order here.

Alex has other not-so-great coverage in the DBR here.

I previously covered Alex's alleged supervision of rogue Christian Bradley Schlozman and his unsolicited intervention in the Ohio election process.

His defense on that -- that I was just informing those poor black voters about their legal rights -- is particularly lame.

I like Alex. He doesn't strike me as aggressively ideological, and his office is filled with many talented attorneys who take their charge as public servants seriously. And of course he is not solely responsible for this Judge Gold order.

But as I say about Frankie boy and 9th Circuit torture judge Jay Bybee, this stuff kinda matters.

It's easy to have integrity and to be highly ethical when you are not particularly pressed by a superior or government to do something possibly dubious or questionable. That's 98 percent of your life.

It's what you do in the other 2 percent that matters.

And that doesn't mean people don't make mistakes sometimes and can't ever do the right thing again. They do and can.

But if you are in denial mode about the original questionable action it is hard to move past it and for others to have confidence in your judgment in the future.

UM Law grad and former Greenberg attorney Alberto Mora gets the love in this great profile:

Though he now lives in a red-brick mini-mansion down a silent, frostbitten cul-de-sac in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., Alberto Mora is at heart a Miami Cuban. Among the clues are a voracious appetite for debate and the Bustelo espresso he brews for visitors to his sparsely decorated home.

And until recently, you could tell by his politics. When U.S. soldiers invaded Iraq in 2003, he was general counsel for the U.S. Navy, the equivalent of a four-star general. He was a die-hard right-winger who had earned appointments to both Bush administrations.

But this past fall, he voted for Barack Obama.

A pivotal reason: He found the Bush administration’s inattention to human rights law “offensive . . . I’m elated and hopeful,” he says during an interview at his home two days before the inauguration, “that this new administration will lead other countries in establishing global prisoner-treatment guidelines that are even more stringent than those in effect before Bush mangled them.”

You could say this is Mora’s thing. Perhaps more than any other American, he’s responsible for turning the tide on prisoner abuse at Guantánamo Bay. For two years, with memos and heavyweight legal arguments, he waged a quietly vicious inner-Pentagon campaign to stop the torture.

“Mora’s an American hero,” says Michael Gelles, a Navy psychologist who also helped bring prisoner abuse to light. “He created a debate that led to a full reversal.”

Hey, General Counsel for the Navy?

That position sounds familiar....I wonder if the person who eventually succeeded Mora similarly fought just as hard, and put his career on the line, to stop prisoner abuse at Gitmo?