PAUL MIRENGOFF: Federal appeals court rips DOJ for misconduct in police prosecution.

After Louisiana prosecutors botched the case against the seven officers, producing a mistrial, the Holder Justice Department took over and obtained convictions. However, the Justice Department engaged in conduct so egregiously unethical that the district court overturned the convictions. And this week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed that ruling in stinging opinion condemning the DOJ prosecutors. . . .

What was the nature of the federal prosecutors’ misconduct? It began with a campaign to inflame potential jurors through the local media, including blogs.

Sal Perricone, a high-ranking prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, using a fake name, posted commentary on Nola.com, the website of the Times-Picayune, that (in the words of the Court of Appeals) “castigated the defendants and their lawyers and repeatedly chastised the New Orleans Police Department as a fish ‘rotten from the head down.’”

Perricone was joined in this outrageous misconduct by Jan Mann, the first assistant to the U.S. attorney.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, Karla Dobinski, a veteran of Holder’s Civil Rights Division, also posted inflammatory commentary under at least one assumed name. Ironically — appallingly — Dobinsky was part of the DOJ “taint team” in this case. As such, she was assigned to protect the civil rights of the indicted defendants.

The cover-up, we are often told, is usually worse than the crime. In this case, the cover-up gave the offense a good run for its money.

Fortunately, they’re Democrats, so the national media need pay no special attention.