SPITZER’S FREE RIDE

I don’t usually stray far from my area of law. However, because I was a prosecutor in a former life, and because the Elliot Spitzer story just incenses me, I wrote in to The New York Times yesterday as soon as I learned that Elliot Spitzer had been cleared of criminal conduct by the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

In today’s Times , an excerpt from my rant is printed on page A28, under the “City Room” column. But I wanted you to see the whole thing, so I have included it below:

“Sorry, but if U.S. Attorney Garcia, with all of the resources the federal government has provided him, which includes legions of assistant prosecutors, could find no criminal conduct in the Spitzer debacle, he either was not looking very hard, or is incompetent. This paltry result of a high profile investigation of a high profile figure is exactly the type of thing that causes people to lose faith in our justice system, as it reinforces the pathetic truth that powerful people can buy themselves out of a jam, using one currency or another, while the rest of us would be thinking about how to tell our children goodbye as we head off to prison.”

It is an exciting time of change in our country, and many of us are still reeling from the election results. But unfortunately, as the results of the “investigation” into Spitzer’s behavior shows, some things never change.