My Two Cents: Edwards, Clemens trials show lack of judgment by federal prosecutors

While teachers, police and firefighters stand in the unemployment line, our government sinks millions of dollars into finding out that John Edwards is a creep and Roger Clemens is really big.

Is anybody watching this Justice Department?

Prosecuting attorneys make their living by choosing who to press charges against and how vigorously to pursue those charges.

On a local level, that system tends to work well.

Prosecutors in Centre County, Pa., went hard after former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky on 48 counts for taking advantage of his mentor role in the most disgusting and gruesome way possible; sexually abusing children through his charity over a 15-year period.

In such stomach-churning trials, prosecutors - like those in Centre County - are right to throw all their resources at putting a predator behind bars.

Federal prosecutors, though, have made a bad streak of choices.

While securities fraudsters and the Wall Street execs that collapsed our national and global economy skate prosecution and collect bonuses larger than the GDPs of most central Asian countries, federal prosecutors under the leadership of Attorney General Eric Holder chase the headlines of supermarket tabloids by going after creeps.

They’re making poor choices and whiffing at the plate.

John Edwards was acquitted of one count and a mistrial was called on five others after federal attorneys threw three-and-a-half years of work and millions of tax dollars at him for trying to hide a mistress.

Nobody can deny the skeevy nature of Edwards fathering a child with another woman while his wife is dying of cancer. And it was wrong to try and cover it up by using money donated to him in his 2008 campaign for President.

(Never mind the failure of national media for letting him come close to the nation’s highest office without finding out about his multiple families.)

There was no complaintant. Nobody - his mistress, Rielle Hunter, the donor Rachel “Bunny” Mellon - nobody complained about being aggrieved by his use of campaign funding.

There was no bribery or corruption.

Frankly, any dollar that went away from his campaign for the office should have been seen as a benefit and a service to our country.

For Clemens, the government spent years and millions trying to prove he lied to Congress in 2008 about using performance-enhancing drugs to play a game.

And when they failed once, they went back after it.

Not terrorism, not human trafficking, not smuggling in undocumented panda bears. For trying to play baseball.

Federal prosecutors only pushed the case at the behest of Congress. The justice department should not bend to the will of politicians seeking only to put their names and faces in the headlines.

So what if professional baseball players inject steroids, human growth hormones or even horse adrenaline or eye of newt into their bodies to play ball better?

As a lifelong fan of America’s Pastime, I agree, the use of steroids detracts from the statistical purity of the game and gives children unrealistic images of how thick a human head should be. But the only reason for members of Congress to take any interest in the matter is to grandstand for their next campaign.

Major League Baseball and the Hall of Fame will decide how to deal with Clemens, Barry Bonds, Rafael Palmeiro and the entire steroid era on their own.

While the Justice Department is wasting its time losing cases with no victims, they are ignoring injustices like the alleged Fast and Furious scheme in which the ATF pumped guns into the hands of Mexican drug lords so they can kill U.S. border patrol agents.

Would these cases be pushed so vigorously if the government had to reimburse defendants’ attorney fees?

How and who is prosecuted is the core of the American justice system.

Edwards’ attorney, Abbe Lowell, cited former Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson after his clients’ trial ended.

In 1940, while serving as Attorney General, Jackson advised the justice department to remember its power and use it judiciously. How to choose what cases to prosecute most vigorously is the role of prosecutors, giving the position “more control over life, liberty and reputation than any other person in America.”

“If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his cases, it follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted.”