Joseph Nacchio, former Qwest Communications CEO, now sleeps on a thin mattress in a Pennsylvania federal prison. For the thousands of investors and Qwest employees aggrieved by his actions, his six year federal sentence feels like sweet justice. While it is right to rejoice in justice, even when harsh, Nacchio’s case is more retribution than justice.

Nacchio made few friends in Denver. He and his family shuttled to and from New Jersey on corporate jets rather than settle in Qwest’s hometown of Denver. He famously equated the venerable U S WEST with a circus, and its employees with clowns. He justified his lavish compensation by insulting baseball. He attacked the press that rightly dogged his mismanagement by belittling their reporters’ age and salary, as if modest pay equates to indignity. He took every opportunity to insult Denver and its perceived lack of a work ethic. He flaunted his personal wealth and sports car collection before audiences who could never enjoy such luxuries. He openly engaged in a personal vendetta against AT&T, the former employer of many of his employees, because he was turned down for its CEO position.

More than an abrasive power fueled despot, Nacchio ran a criminal enterprise. Qwest’s warehouses became full of worthless equipment, bought from vendors who gave Nacchio and his lieutenants’ stock options as a part of the deal. Qwest inflated its earnings by pre-booking revenues for services contracts that existed only on paper – swapping worthless assets and claiming fraudulent revenues. Indeed, even before its U S WEST acquisition, Qwest was a house of cards trying to outrace inevitable failure. Subsequent SEC and shareholder lawsuits confirmed the massive scope of Qwest’s fraud.

Inexcusably, federal prosecutors declined to indict Nacchio for overseeing these serious crimes. Instead, they charged him with the boogey-man crime of insider trading. Perhaps they assumed typical jurors would be bewildered by terms like ‘indefeasible right to use,’ and ‘revenue recognition.’ More cynically, they might have concluded that Denver’s hatred for Nacchio would carry any case to conviction. In any event, Nacchio was prosecuted for a nebulous crime he probably never committed.

Nacchio didn’t wake up one morning, conclude that Qwest was on the brink of bankruptcy, and dump his shares. He had constructed a well disclosed plan to sell some of his Qwest shares over a long period of time. Indeed, as Qwest shares fell, he stopped selling them. The government’s case relied on a tenuous timeline and very limited evidence that he sold his shares based on insider information.

Indeed, Qwest’s harebrained CFO, Robin Szeliga, recently testified that the alleged insider information Nacchio traded on was actually a 1.4% revenue shortfall, not the 4.2% shortfall told to the jury. Szeliga’s selection as CFO, despite her well established incompetence, is only explained as an effort by Nacchio to keep competent and skeptical eyes off his crooked books. What poetic justice that her failure to competently testify may have put him in prison, as a minor revenue shortfall would not suggest illegal trading.

Nacchio is a wrongly convicted crook, the least sympathetic defendant imaginable. Nobody sheds a tear for his comeuppance, but citizens should be concerned for the broader implications. Prosecutors had a solid and legitimate case against Nacchio, but took the easy way nonetheless. Most objectionable is the prosecutors’ cynical calculus that, once they decided to prosecute Nacchio, they could choose any path no matter how unjust. Nacchio was a victim of his unpopularity, which the prosecution traded on.

The Nacchio case is one of several whereby prosecutors abuse an unsympathetic defendant. Indeed, abusive prosecutors often gin up ill will in an effort to pre-convict. The Duke Lacrosse players, Martha Stewart, Gov. Blagojevich, Sen. Stevens, and Rep. DeLay are recent examples of such abuse. In each case unscrupulous prosecutors abused their discretion by smearing presumptively innocent people.

The power to smear defendants and then trade on their unpopularity is the de-facto power to lock-up anybody at the government’s choosing. Such government arrogance can also be seen in the Obama administration’s kicking around the business community without due process. The prosecutorial culture needs a thorough cleansing to restore a pursuit of justice rather than simply the conviction of people ‘everyone’ knows are guilty.