Democracy in Peril

By Steve Sebelius

The temptation, when it comes to Republican activist Tony Dane, is to dismiss him as an irrelevant political hack who resorts to lies, trickery and deceit in a terminally unsuccessful quest for respectability.

And we should all yield to that temptation, whenever his antics are revealed.

But that doesn't mean, as the saying goes, that a blind squirrel can't find an acorn once in a great while. Dane's latest bit of campaign shenanigans involved sending out a mailer slamming attorney Steve Wolfson in the special election for Las Vegas City Council Ward 2. (By the time you read this, you'll know the winner; it was written before voters took to the polls Tuesday.)

Wolfson's crime? In his private practice as a lawyer, he represented clients accused of sexual crimes involving underage people. Wolfson, Dane said, allowed "child predators to walk our streets."

Leave aside for a moment the fact that Dane was characteristically sloppy with his facts--not all the defendants he named were actually represented by Wolfson--and that his claim that nobody prompted him to send the mailer or paid him to do it is highly suspect.

There's still a legitimate issue here.

Sure, Wolfson was doing his job, and nobody can say he supports sexual crimes against minors. But the fact is, he accepted those clients, and went to work for them. And that's a legitimate issue to hit him with during a campaign for office.

Now, it shouldn't disqualify him from office. After all, Mayor Oscar Goodman represented accused killers in his private practice, and that didn't stop the voters from electing him overwhelmingly in two elections.

The great prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi once explained in his book on the now 10-year-old O.J. Simpson trial that there is only one question to be answered in our system of justice: Can the prosecutor meet his burden of proof?

If he can, the defendant is guilty, and goes to jail. If not, the defendant goes free, an innocent man.

It doesn't matter if the accused actually committed the crime. It only matters if the prosecutor can prove the accused actually committed the crime.

Wolfson's job was to provide as vigorous a defense as possible, to ensure that when a jury finally gets to deliberate on the case, the defendant has received the most fair trial possible. And only then can we have confidence in the results of those trials.

Imagine a system without the Wolfsons, the Goodmans or the brave Navy JAG lawyers defending prisoners held in the current war on terror. Without them, we'd all be in somebody's version of Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay, isolated, restrained and unable to fight the behemoth that is the system.

Dane meant for us all to look at Wolfson's clients and associate them with the attorney. And to one extent or another, we can question his judgment. No law says an attorney must represent every client who comes through his door.

But in a larger sense, we owe Wolfson and those like him a debt of gratitude. Far from gaming the system, they make it work.