Legal Fairness: No. Poetic Justice: Yes

As the media revel in all the lurid details of the Eliot Spitzer scandal, ask yourself this question: How is it that we know any of this stuff?

The short answer: U.S. federal prosecutors leaked it. The court documents referred only to a mysterious "Client Number Nine" -- reflecting the usual rule that individuals who are not accused of a crime should not be publicly embarrassed.

Having shared these documents with the media, prosecutors then verbally disclosed that Client Number Nine was the Governor of the State of New York.

This was really a shocking and wrong thing to do.

Prosecutors exist to enforce laws. You may be cruel, you may be arrogant, you may be faithless -- but until you can be proven to have committed a crime, your misdeeds are no business of the law enforcement authorities.

Yet in Spitzer's case, prosecutors have smashed his career and his life without so much as filing an indictment, let alone proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Appalling! Or is it?

Leaking Spitzer's name was improper, abusive, harshly vindictive -- and completely understandable.

For throughout his own previous career, Eliot Spitzer had showed himself one of the most vicious abusers of prosecutorial powers in recent American history.

First as an officer of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, then as New York's Attorney-General, Spitzer had used leaks and publicity as a weapon to destroy others and advance his own ambitions --ambitions that apparently aimed no lower than the presidency of the United States.

One notorious example: In the spring of 2005, Spitzer's office was investigating transactions at the American International Group (AIG), one of the world's leading insurance companies.

Without filing any charges, Spitzer publicly accused Maurice "Hank" Greenberg of accounting fraud and other serious crimes. Under pressure from Spitzer, AIG's board forced Greenberg to resign.

Not for months did Spitzer get around to bringing a case against Greenberg. He did to Greenberg exactly what loose-lipped prosecutors have now done to him: Attacked his reputation and destroyed his career without affording him the opportunity to defend himself in a court of law.

When Spitzer did finally lodge criminal charges against Greenberg, every single one of them had to be dropped for lack of evidence: The case never went to trial. Spitzer then brought a civil action against Greenberg. Civil actions require lower standards of proof than criminal charges. Yet that civil case has also largely collapsed.

Not all of Spitzer's prosecutions ended so dismally. Some of his cases had real merit, especially his investigations of abuses at the research arms of financial firms. Others -- like the campaign against Dick Grasso, former head of the New York Stock Exchange--had less.

In good cases and bad, though, Spitzer vilified his targets without waiting for judge or jury. Weeks before the trial, he appeared on a popular Sunday morning TV show to call Greenberg a liar and a crook: "That company [AIG] was a black box, run with an iron fist by a CEO who did not tell the public the truth." Greenberg remains a rich man and can afford to fight for his vindication. The same is true for Dick Grasso. In time, Spitzer's unproven allegations will lose their power to harm.

But that's not good enough, is it? Officials armed with the enormous powers of legal prosecution are supposed to exercise enormous restraint.

Equipped with the power of the search warrant, they have access to the most intimate documents of the people they investigate. For that reason, they are supposed to respect the confidentiality of what they read until they are ready to go to trial.

Entrusted with the power to humiliate society's most respected leaders by accusing them of crimes, they are expected to remain silent about their suspicions until they have amassed enough evidence to file an indictment.

Spitzer never honoured those fundamental ethical rules. He leaked and defamed and abused, treating his personal hunches as the equivalent of a guilty verdict, all for his own political advancement. Now he has been felled by exactly the same ugly methods to which he owed his rise.

That's not the right standard for American law. But it certainly is poetic justice.