The Famous Get Justice With a Vengeance

Carved over the entrance to the Supreme Court are the words “Equal Justice Under Law”--a succinct summary of the solemn promise that the Constitution holds out of equality for all citizens before courts dedicated to impartial decision-making. The sad case of John Zaccaro, however, teaches that the maxim is now perhaps better stated as “equal justice under law” for the average citizen, and “ ‘justice’ with a vengeance” for the famous.

It is impossible to believe that anything other than his wife’s elevation to that strange status of celebrity led to John Zaccaro’s troubles. He had been a businessman with complex affairs long before his wife became a vice presidential candidate. It was only with the spotlight of public attention on Geraldine Ferraro that the glare of public and prosecutorial attention was turned on him. He was recently acquitted by a jury on bribery and extortion charges. Two years ago he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of scheming to defraud in connection with a real-estate deal in which he misstated his net worth on a loan application.

The situation of the Zaccaros should serve as a horrific example to every professional couple as well as to every individual whose professional affairs involve any level of complexity. The human cost of public office, whether elective or appointive, has become much too high.

The “what if” situations that every candidate must now be prepared to deal with are relatively easy to generate.

What if your lawyer-wife was once the treasurer of a Bar association committee and discovered several years after her tenure at the committee had ended that, thanks to an accounting error, she was still in possession of several hundred dollars of the committee’s money? What if your doctor-husband was once, as a resident, listed as a defendant in a malpractice suit along with the 20 other doctors whose names appeared on the chart of a patient who died in the hospital where he was training? What if your wife once had a job typing for an investment company that was busy selling swamp land to little old ladies and was subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury when the scam came to light? What if your husband has a friend from law school who works for a public official who is suspected of being involved in a municipal-corruption scandal?

In the glare of the publicity that accompanies celebrity, it will little matter that your wife returned the money to the committee with interest; that a careful review of the documents of the malpractice suit would reveal that your husband had no involvement at all in the death of the patient; that your wife never understood that there was a scam in operation, much less how it was accomplished, or that all that your husband and his buddy ever do together is fish, drink beer and talk baseball.

In all these examples the decision by the candidate would have to be whether the office was worth exposing the spouse and the whole family to the scrutiny of the press. Trial by the press, as recent events have demonstrated all too vividly, is bad enough, but it now seems that potential candidates for high office must be concerned that trial by the press won’t be the only one that they or those near and dear to them might have to endure.

John Zaccaro was investigated and indicted by the normal prosecutorial machinery of New York, and was tried in the courts of that state. It was a trial that shouldn’t have happened. As John Santucci, the Queens D.A. responsible for the prosecution of Zaccaro, put it in an astonishing understatement, “Problems with the case became obvious at trial.” The prosecution’s chief witness was officially declared “hostile” when he testified that in his opinion the facts that the prosecutor relied on him to establish did not amount to solicitation of the bribe that the prosecutor was attempting to prove by means of his testimony. The defense rested without presenting any case at all--a risky move, but one entirely appropriate in these circumstances: The prosecution had established nothing that the defense needed to refute.

Why do prosecutions like these occur? Sometimes the reason seems to be political; sometimes it just seems that, as a nation, we are just as quick to savor the downfall of public figures as we are to believe the Madison Avenue celebrity machine that usually creates them. Such prosecutions also might themselves be a byproduct of the celebrity process, with a prosecutor seeking to make his or her own name. Being an aggressive, “crusading” prosecutor or investigator has long been an almost sure-fire way to achieve fame, and many a career has had its own roots in the downfall of another.

There are quite a few problems with this. Serious public accusations of this type ruin careers, and at least potentially ruin marriages, family harmony and mental and physical health--to say nothing of finances. The costs of defense are staggering, and not recoverable. A trial can easily cost a defendant as much as $50,000 per week. Reputations are also dangerously imperiled, and in some cases may also be irrecoverable. Public figures who are acquitted after such trials are fully entitled to ask where they can go to get their reputations back.

There is yet another dangerous problem with hasty, ill-conceived prosecutions: that in the rush to indict, real problems and real offenses will be overlooked. And if they are, they will almost surely never be brought to light. Once a public figure has survived an onslaught of this type, there is little if any chance that he or she will be subjected to intense prosecutorial scrutiny again. After all, the exercise failed to yield the desired result: The prosecution did not serve as the great exemplar of public morality that the American people are thought to hunger after, and did not advance the career of the prosecutor.

The people of this country deserve a system that delivers what those noble words over the entrance to the Supreme Court promise. But to achieve a judicial system that dispenses justice under law equally and impartially to all citizens, even the famous, we must separate our prosecutors from the workings of the vast American celebrity machine, from political pressures and from the temptations of celebrity for themselves. We must also recognize that justice is best served by careful, often quiet investigations conducted under impartial, nonpartisan conditions.