If there is any solace in the government’s case against alleged spy Wen Ho Lee, it is in demonstrating the importance of our Sixth Amendment guarantees of a public trial and challenge against our accusers.

Dr. Lee, an Energy Department scientist who worked at the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory, was indicted Friday on 59 counts related to transferring nuclear weapons secrets to a nonsecure computer. For more than a year, he was widely accused by federal law enforcement of giving China secret U.S. nuclear secrets, including information about the W-88 nuclear warhead.

Yet Dr. Lee is not accused in those indictments of giving national secrets to another nation; rather, he is accused of mishandling secret computer files. And he may prove to be guilty of one or more of the indictments against him or be found not guilty of breaking any law. Whatever the outcome, one truth remains: He will always be considered a spy, because that is what the government has labeled him — to date, without cause.

As far back as November 1998, Federal Bureau of Investigations staffers began to question whether Lee leaked secrets to China. According to Dr. Lee’s supervisor, as many as 250 people had access to the secrets the FBI accuses him of stealing. And in September, the FBI — faced with the fact it could not pin the theft of nuclear secrets on the scientist — decided to expand its investigation to other parties.

The public rightly expects law enforcement to present us with the facts they know and it rightly demands that all the accused receive fair and impartial trials in a court of law, where the evidence is presented and can be reasonably cross-examined.

The FBI has effectively robbed Dr. Lee of his right to be innocent, at least in the court of public opinion, and it has done so by repeating unsupported accusations often enough so that, for the public, they now bear the mark of truth.

That is a travesty of justice in every sense of the term: It does not serve the truth, it does not serve fairness, and it does not serve either the public’s right to punish the guilty, or Dr. Lee’s presumed right to be innocent.