Conviction of Former Media Mogul Black to Be Reviewed
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Tuesday, May 19, 2009
The Supreme Court agreed yesterday to review the conviction of media magnate Conrad Black, who is serving a 6 1/2 -year sentence for mail fraud and obstruction of justice.
Black was convicted in 2007 of stealing more than $6 million from Hollinger, now known as Sun-Times Media Group, in an illegal executive compensation scheme.
The decision to review the Black case will involve the court in an evolving controversy about how mail and wire fraud laws have been expanded by a provision covering deprivation of the "right to honest services." The provision has made it easier for prosecutors to convict public officials, but the lower courts are divided about how it relates to private employers.
Besides Black and two other Hollinger executives who brought the case, former Enron chief executive Jeffrey K. Skilling raised the issue in asking the court to review his conviction.
Black's lawyer, Miguel Estrada, told the court that Black was convicted despite any evidence that the complicated payment scheme at issue came at a cost to the company. He said in a petition to the court that "the government is prosecuting private conduct that has no connection to the type of honest services fraud that prompted the 1988 expansion of the mail fraud statute in the first place -- public corruption by government servants."
Estrada said in an interview that Black's case provides the court the chance to examine how the "honest services" provision is being used in the private sector.
"He was convicted of something that was not a crime," Estrada said of Black.
The issue has already drawn the attention of Justice Antonin Scalia, who objected in February when the court declined an appeal from Chicago public officials that raised the issue. Scalia said the "honest services" provision was being used to "impose criminal penalties upon a staggeringly broad swath of behavior."
Given that and the disagreement among the federal circuits about how the law should be interpreted, Scalia said, "it seems to me quite irresponsible to let the current chaos prevail."
-- Robert Barnes
