In November of 1991, I was in my third year of law school. I was on the hunt for a job, and one afternoon a representative from Florida’s Dade County Prosecutors Office visited our campus. I was one of his last interviews of the day.

After a bit of initial chit-chat, he hit me with a hypothetical that he had already bounced off a couple dozen of my fellow job-seeking classmates: “A potential case comes to you. You’re not sure whether the alleged perpetrator is guilty or not. What do you do? Do you bring the case to trial?”

I had spent the previous six months working for the Massachusetts Attorney General as a 3:03 attorney, which meant that even though I was in law school I functioned pretty much as a full-grown Assistant Attorney General. I had appeared before numerous courts throughout the Commonwealth and shared office space with some of the state’s most stone-cold prosecutors. I easily fielded the hypo.

“It’s a prosecutor’s job to do justice,” I told my interviewer. “Since the prosecutor in this instance doesn’t think the accused is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, he would be doing something that he knew was an injustice if he got the accused convicted. He shouldn’t bring the case.”

As Homer Simpson would say, “Swish!” The interviewer, a gentle man who clearly believed what he was saying, told me I was the first person all day to handle the hypo so well. Everyone else said bring the case and let the jury decide. He couldn’t believe that the next generation of law school grads was so out of touch with basic prosecutorial ethics. He invited me to come to Miami and meet the head of his office, a woman by the name of Janet Reno. (I did meet Mother Justice and get my job offer, but that’s a story for another day.)

I walked out of the interview room beaming. But the grin was smug. The only reason I was able to so effortlessly handle the hypothetical was because I had become so thoroughly schooled in the typical prosecutor’s platitudes by walking amongst them for the past six months. What I had told my interviewer was a total crock, and certainly not indicative of the way things worked in the real world.

WHILE I WAS IN THE MASSACHUSETSS ATTORNEY GENERAL’S OFFICE, THE A.G. was a guy named Scott Harshbarger. Scott had been a professor of mine at B.U. in an ethics course (supply your own ironic joke here). Because I thought I wanted to be a prosecutor, I had begun an energetic suck-up campaign from my first day in his class.

I really liked Scott personally, and I loved working for him. So did everyone in his office. But Scott had a certain stain on his reputation back then that’s only grown through the years. Scott was the guy primarily responsible for the prosecution and conviction of the Amiraults.

The Amirault case was one of the child-abuse/molestation cases that blighted our system in the late 1980’s. The three Amiraults that Scott’s office convicted owned and operated a child-care center. To any thinking person both at the time and retrospectively, they were innocent. And yet all three went to jail and had their lives ruined.

The prosecutors that I worked with at the Attorney General’s office were great fun. They were gunslingers. They worked hard and played hard. But, in spite of my fondness for these people, I have to admit that navel-gazing sessions on the meanings of justice weren’t in their repertoire. They sought convictions. Convicting famous people was better than convicting anonymous foes. Headlines were better than anonymity. In short, justice was a game.

I don’t mean this to sound as harsh as I know it’s coming out. But it’s the truth, and most people who have dealt with prosecutors will say the same thing. Prosecutors will tell you that we have an adversarial system that rests on the principle that if both sides play to win, justice will be done. This is true enough, and the system gets a lot more right than it does wrong. But it’s also true, and undeniable, that the good guys don’t always win.

PATRICK FITZGERALD IS A PROSECUTOR. He came to the Valerie Plame affair with his typical agenda – get someone thrown in jail. It was Scooter Libby’s misfortune that he was the one without chair when the music stopped. It was his greater misfortune that there wasn’t a bigger fish nibbling on prosecutor Fitzgerald’s line. If there had been, Scooter Libby would still be a mostly anonymous public servant today.

Did Scotter Libby break the law and perjure himself before a Grand Jury? As a legal fact, yes. A jury has said so, and that’s that. Of course, juries make a lot of things legal facts that shouldn’t be.

But I’m willing to play along with the jury and agree that Scooter Libby did commit the crimes that they convicted him of yesterday. This is one of those instances where the adversarial system should indeed have produced a proper result. Fitzgerald is a great lawyer; Libby could afford equally stellar counsel for himself. There’s no reason to believe that if the facts weren’t on his side, Fitzgerald could have still so handily outfought Libby’s counsel to nevertheless win a conviction.

And yet there’s something about this case that still strikes me as unsettling and unnerving. For political reasons, the purportedly aggrieved parties of Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame got their own private prosecutor whose entire job was to make sure someone went to jail because of the scandal in which the Wilsons were the featured players. Even as the main charges turned out to be unfounded or at the very least un-provable, an undeterred Fitzgerald fought on, determined to get someone, anyone, thrown in jail.

As I watched Fitzgerald give his presser yesterday, I didn’t get the sense that this was a man who thought justice had been done. No, his satisfaction was more akin to the athlete who had just won a big game. And the loser was Libby, even though he had no interest in taking the field.

ON MOST LEVELS, COMPARING SCOOTER LIBBY to the Amiraults is obscene. Libby is probably guilty of a crime; the Amiraults were innocent. While the Amiraults were anonymous people who had their lives shattered by zealous, amoral prosecutors, Libby’s personal catastrophe will be of a lesser magnitude.

It will still, however, be a personal catastrophe. And both cases are symbolic of unequal justice being meted out by flawed people exploiting the holes in a flawed system. Both Scooter Libby and the Amiraults became the objects of a prosecutor’s obsession. Both suffered the consequences.

Many on the right are already arguing for Scooter Libby’s pardon. The Wall Street Journal argues that a pardon is necessary to trump the ongoing “criminalization of politics.” My friend John Podhoretz argues more to the point that “if Bush fails to pardon Libby, he will implicitly be accepting the contention that Scooter Libby was part of a White House conspiracy at the highest levels to destroy the career of a CIA agent whose husband had proved Bush & Co. had lied us into the Iraq War.”

As J-Pod suggests, Patrick Fitzgerald sought a symbolic victory in court. He got it. But the life he ruined was real.

That doesn’t feel like justice to me.

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