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Alan Dershowitz on SpitzerGate: What Is This? Russia?

By Dan Slater

Lavrenti Beria, the head of Joseph Stalin’s KGB, once quipped to his boss, “show me the man and I will find the crime.” The Soviet Union was notorious for having accordion-like criminal laws that could be adjusted to fit almost any dissident target. The U.S. is a far cry from the Soviet Union, but our laws are dangerously overbroad. — Alan Dershowitz

That’s Harvard prof Alan Dershowitz in an op-ed — “The Entrapment of Eliot” — in today’s WSJ. Dershowitz, who taught Spitzer’s crim law class at Harvard, has, in a quite public way, rushed to Spitzer’s defense. In addition to this morning’s WSJ piece, Dershowitz appeared on CNN two nights ago, where he argued that Spitzer’s political future should be decided by New York voters, not the feds.

“The federal criminal investigation that has led to Eliot Spitzer’s resignation as governor of New York illustrates the great dangers all Americans face from vague and open-ended sex and money-transaction statutes,” Dershowitz wrote in the WSJ. “Congress enacted these laws to give federal prosecutors wide discretion in deciding which ‘bad guys’ to go after.”

Generally, says Dershowitz, “wise and intelligent prosecutors” use proper discretion in pursuing the real bad guys, such as mobsters, terrorists and exploiters of children. But, he claims, “selectively enforced statutes . . . lie around like loaded guns waiting to be used against the enemies of politically motivated investigators, prosecutors and politicians.”

Dershowitz’s proposal is that over-broad criminal statutes should be narrowed so that they can be used only to prosecute predatory crimes with real victims, not to facilitate politically-motivated prosecutions like Spitzer’s. In Dershowitz’s words: “Money laundering, structuring and related financial crimes are designed to ferret out organized crime, drug dealing, terrorism and large-scale financial manipulation. They were not enacted to give the federal government the power to inquire into the sexual or financial activities of men who move money in order to hide payments to prostitutes.”

LB Readers: What’s your response to this? When Dershowitz made similar arguments on CNN the other night, The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin said he couldn’t believe Dershowitz was saying this. Can you?

Law Blog YouTube Clip of the Day: We’ve often heard that Jerry Springer (yes, that Jerry Springer) was a once-in-a-generation political talent who could have been a big-time player in the Democratic party — that is, had he not been beset with his own prostitute problems. Click here for a fascinating early-1980s clip of Springer in the midst of the Ohio governor’s race, asking Democratic voters to look past his own indiscretions. They didn’t. He lost his party’s primary.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 13, 2008 (boomark / email).