Michael Wolff:has a really smart piece in The Guardian about the three show trials this year – each about the scandal du jour – cyberbullying of young people (Dharun Ravi); insider-trading (Rajat Gupta); and covering up adultery with campaign finance money (John Edwards). All three, he argues convincingly, demonstrate how the modern trial is more about the public and the jury’s inflated self-righteousness than it is about the facts in the case.

In fact, in all three, there was no real crime at stake.

Of course, it doesn’t mean that there wasn’t bad behavior. It just means the behavior didn’t warrant the full-blown media strobe lights and prosecutorial theatrics on display:

“Someone has to pay for being rich. (Likewise, of all the people committing adultery, someone has to occasionally pay for that, too.) In this case, the prosecutor has the further advantage that Rajat Gupta is accused of exchanging information with Raj Rajaratnam – and what does that tell you?

As for Dharun Ravi, the jury members seemed particularly gleeful in their jobs. Although nothing that Ravi did would have merited anything more than a ordinary college disciplinary proceedings (if that), were it not for the suicide that the prosecutors could not connect Ravi to, the jury nevertheless agreed that he could go to jail for a decade or more.

It took the New Jersey Middlesex Country judge, Glenn Berman, to restore, solomonically, some perspective. Judge Berman delivered the lecture that Ravi deserved, and then reduced his possible decade or more of incarceration to 30 days – in effect, tossing out the verdict and the point of the trial. Still, the prosecutors, you can figure, will not be chastened so much as galvanized by such judicial proportion.

And then, there is John Edwards. Is it possible to imagine a more preposterous prosecution? The money he used to hide his mistress was a “campaign contribution” because if voters had known he had a mistress, they surely would not have voted for him. There is something here as convoluted as the cause-and-effect chain in insider trading cases: everything that you know and are converges in a circumstance that is suspicious because it is advantageous (note: people who lose money on insider information are never prosecuted). Success is the crime. If he had been a less successful politician (and hence, less hypocritical), if he had been less self-dramatizing, if his wife had been less self-dramatizing, if his aide had been less self-dramatizing, it would have been just ordinary adultery – instead of campaign finance abuse adultery.

Would anyone argue that any of these cases would have been brought without the vast media attention that they have gotten? It is almost impossible to imagine what a jury would think, if it didn’t also understand that it was acting as the conscience of the world. If it just saw itself as an untangler and arbiter of fact, it might more reasonably pull up its nose and ask what it was doing here? I doubt any prosecutor could reasonably explain these cases – or would they even try? – if they were not inflated by social purpose and juiciness.

Trials have often existed in a tabloid world, but that is usually because they have showcased bloody dramas and primal human conflict. As the tabloid world has changed, becoming more about how men rise and fall, about who knows what about whom, and about whatever sanctimony is the flavor of the month, the great trials have, not coincidentally, become about that, too.””

One good thing to take from these three is that two of them, Edwards and Ravi, ended the right way, with the defendants winning. It shows that the legal system, even under the pressure of public opinion, can give the right answer.

Hopefully, the Gupta trial will end the same way.