Legal News

Prosecutors Behaving Badly ? Spitzer Has Company

By Jamie Heller

WSJ colleagues Nathan Koppel and Kevin Helliker did some reporting on prosecutors behaving badly. Turns out Mr. Spitzer is not alone.

The shock — shock! — the public felt when they heard this week that New York’s governor had sought the services of a prostitute was in many corners less about the action than the hypocrisy. After all, Eliot Spitzer had been the state’s hard-charging top prosecutor.

But prosecutor as perpetrator isn’t an entirely shocking scenario. It’s happened before. And when the accuser becomes the accused, astonishment runs off the charts. “There’s nothing quite as confounding as someone who is supposed to smite evil caving in to impulse,” says Scott Turow, the Chicago lawyer and best-selling novelist, of prosecutors.

In Houston’s Harris County, two-term district attorney Charles Rosenthal last month announced his resignation after intimate emails he sent last year to a former secretary surfaced in a federal civil rights case. The emails also included racially derogatory material and evidence that the prosecutor had used his office in part to run his campaign for reelection.

In his resignation letter, Rosenthal (pictured, left) said prescription drugs had impaired his judgment. Rosenthal’s counsel did not return calls for comment.

Two months before Rosenthal’s resignation came the downfall of one of the most famous lawmen in Kansas since Wyatt Earp. As DA of the state’s most prosperous and populous county, Paul Morrison was famous for aggressive prosecution, helping him to a landslide victory as state AG in 2006. But last fall, a former assistant filed a sexual harassment case against him with the federal government. The claim said that the assistant and Morrison (pictured, center) had had a long-standing extra-marital affair, and that the attorney general had asked her to provide him with information about her boss, a political rival of Morrison’s.

While admitting to the affair, Morrison publicly denied that he had harassed or committed crimes. But after initially vowing to stay in his job, Morrison resigned within days. He did not comment.

Spitzer’s woes evoke painful memories for Steve Clark. As the state AG of Arkansas, Clark (pictured, right) aggressively convicted criminals and portrayed himself as being “on the side of angels.”

At the same time, however, he was stealing money from the state.  “When you are a fraud, people are upset because they believed in you,” says Clark, who left office under a cloud and was convicted of misusing state funds in 1990. He had been charged with theft by deception, a felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison. “The allegation is that I used a state-issued credit card to buy food and liquor that was not related to state business. That allegation was true,” he says. He was convicted and fined $10,000.

Turow, a former AUSA whose award-winning novels explore the intersection of human frailty and the law, believes it behooves a prosecutor to recognize his own potential for wrongdoing. “My attitude toward crime, many crimes, is there but for the grace of God,” he says. “And I would throw Spitzer’s alleged crime into that category, even though I can tell you categorically that I never visited a prostitute.”

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