A not guilty finding means your still stuck paying the bills, The Justice Department won't help you.

A judge had a warning for the Justice Department lawyers who accused Army Lt. Col. Robert Morris of conspiring to steal military supplies: The case could be "ill-advised." A nearly two-year Army probe had cleared him. And another U.S. attorney's office had declined to prosecute.
The cost of fighting federal charges could "take the guy's life savings away," the judge added.

Prosecutors went ahead, anyway. The judge's prediction was right a jury needed only 45 minutes to find Morris not guilty. By then, though, his career had derailed. His parents had mortgaged their home to help with $250,000 in legal bills. He had drained his own savings.

The government he had served in uniform for decades could have compensated Morris for some of the losses. A 1997 law requires the Justice Department to repay the legal bills of defendants who win their cases and prove that federal prosecutors committed misconduct or other transgressions.

Hyde Amendment awards are so infrequent and so small that the law "hasn't been a major remedy for bad prosecutions," said Bennett Gershman, a Pace Law School professor who examined the misconduct cases USA TODAY identified. "It's a very minuscule deterrent" to prosecutors.

The law, known as the Hyde Amendment, was intended to deter misconduct and compensate people who are harmed when federal prosecutors cross the line. A USA TODAY investigation found the law has left innocent people like Morris coping not only with ruined careers and reputations but with heavy legal costs. And it hasn't stopped federal prosecutors from committing misconduct or pursuing legally questionable cases.

USA TODAY documented 201 cases in the years since the law's passage in which federal judges found that Justice Department prosecutors violated laws or ethics rules. Although those represent a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of federal criminal cases filed each year, the problems were so grave that judges dismissed indictments, reversed convictions or rebuked prosecutors for misconduct. Yet USA TODAY found only 13 cases in which the government paid anything toward defendants' legal bills. Most people never seek compensation. Most who do end up emptyhanded.


Link:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/judicial/2010-09-27-hyde-federal-prosecutors_N.htm