Dershowitz: Spitzer’s Sexual Peccadilloes Are Not the Feds’ Business
Updated: Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz contends that federal money laundering and sex-crime laws have been unfairly used to trap Eliot Spitzer in an unfortunate episode that shows the danger of these open-ended statutes.
These laws “lie around like loaded guns waiting to be used against the enemies of politically motivated investigators, prosecutors and politicians,” Dershowitz writes in an op-ed column for the Wall Street Journal.
If the federal government wanted to shut down Emporers Club VIP, all it had to do was send an undercover agent to pose as a customer, Dershowitz writes. Instead the feds “wiretapped 5,000 phone conversations, intercepted 6,000 emails, used surveillance and undercover tactics that are more appropriate for trapping terrorists than entrapping johns,” he writes. Apparently the aim was “to catch and embarrass Mr. Spitzer with his own recorded words, which could be, and were, leaked to the media.”
“It’s simply none of the federal government’s business that a man may have been moving his own money around in order to keep his wife in the dark about his private sexual peccadilloes,” Dershowitz concludes.
In a separate op-ed published yesterday in the Jewish Daily Forward, Dershowitz takes aim at prostitution statutes. “The laws criminalizing adult consensual prostitution—especially with $5,000-an-hour call girls—are as anachronistic as the old laws that used to criminalize adultery, fornication, homosexuality and even masturbation. These may be sins, but there are no real victims, except for family members,” he writes.
Updated at 12:12 p.m. to include second Dershowitz article.
