Conrad Black was more in favor of the USA and traditional family than any other publication owner in Canada or Britain. That’s why he’s been officiously and falsely attacked by the richest constituents and their judicial employees.
High Court: Vague law may free Conrad Black - NYP, 2009 December 9, by Paul Tharp
The imprisoned former publisher, who still sits in the British House of Lords, stands to have his conviction for looting $6.1 million from his collapsed company tossed by the US Supreme Court. The high court yesterday agreed to review his conviction, as well as the convictions of two other white-collar criminals, on the grounds that a single-sentence law hastily added by Congress to the stronger antitrust statutes is unconstitutional. In arguments yesterday, the high court hammered for an hour at vagueness in the law, raising prospects it might shoot down the section when its review is completed in about eight months. Justice Stephen Breyer chided one government lawyer, who pressed to keep Black behind bars, that of the 150 million workers in the US "I think possibly 140 million of them would flunk your test" of the law. Black, 65, who has long boasted he would beat the system, was able to focus on the law's narrow flaw, which said "failure to deliver honest services" is a felony, without offering any definitions of "honest services," said legal experts. The narrow law was tagged onto statutes in 1988 at the height of Wall Street's insider-trading and junk-bond scandals, and was used in Enron prosecutions it the late 1990s. Black, who's served barely two years of a 6½-year sentence, and two of his executives were convicted in 2007 of stealing $6.1 million from Hollinger, a newspaper publisher he controlled. The Supreme Court's ruling could also set free Enron's former CEO Jeffrey Skilling, who's served three years of a 24-year sentence. He's also submitting papers to fight the "honest services" clause. Conrad Black's ego could swell even larger if he succeeds as the convict who opened the cells of some of the most notorious white-collar criminals jailed in the past decade.