While opening the door to a new trial for former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling, in a 6-3 vote the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Skilling’s argument that pre-trial publicity made a free trial impossible. -db
The New York Times
June 24, 2010
By Adam Liptak
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Ruling for two prominent corporate executives in prison for fraud, the Supreme Court on Thursday dramatically narrowed the scope of a law often used by federal prosecutors in corruption cases.
The justices were unanimous in calling at least the broadest interpretation of the law, which makes it a crime “to deprive another of the intangible right of honest services,” unconstitutionally vague. The decisions call into question the convictions of Jeffrey K. Skilling, a former chief executive of Enron, the Houston energy company, and Conrad M. Black, the newspaper executive convicted of defrauding his media company, Hollinger International.
The decisions may also have implications for many other cases, including those of former Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois, whose trial for violating the law is underway in Chicago, and Joseph L. Bruno, once one of the most prominent politicians in New York who was convicted of federal corruption charges in December.
The law has been the subject of frequent criticism in the lower courts for giving potential defendants too little guidance and prosecutors too much discretion.
“How can the public be expected to know what the statute means when the judges and prosecutors themselves do not know, or must make it up as they go along?” Judge Dennis Jacobs of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, asked in a 2003 dissent.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in writing the majority decision in both the Skilling and Black cases on Thursday, said the law must be limited to the core offenses of bribes and kickbacks. Mr. Skilling’s conduct, she said from the bench, “entailed no bribe or kickback.”
The court sent both cases back to the lower courts. Mr. Skilling’s lawyers have argued that a decision in his favor should void his entire conviction, which was based on several theories. That, Justice Ginsburg wrote, is “an open question.”
In Mr. Black’s case, the justices instructed the lower courts to reconsider his conviction in light of Thursday’s decision.
Three members of the court, Justice Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Anthony M. Kennedy, would have gone further than the majority and struck down the law entirely.
By a separate 6-to-3 vote, the justices rejected a second challenge from Mr. Skilling, who said that he had not received a fair trial in Houston in 2006, given the widespread prejudice against Enron.
In a brief, unsigned opinion, the justices also returned a third honest-services cases to the lower courts for further consideration, this one involving a former Alaska legislator, Bruce Weyhrauch, who did not disclose soliciting work from a company with business before the Legislature. Mr. Weyhrauch had argued that the federal honest-services law should not apply in public corruption cases where no violation of a state law was alleged.