WASHINGTON — For the third time in as many months the Supreme Court on Monday will hear arguments on a criminal statute that some blast as unconstitutionally vague and could be used against virtually every worker in the United States.<\/p>\n
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Monday’s case before the high court involves former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling who is serving a 24 year prison sentence for his role in the epic collapse of the once powerful energy giant.<\/p>\n
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Prosecutors in Skilling’s case used a federal law known as “honest services” to help secure their conviction.\u00a0 The premise of law is that it gives prosecutors an additional tool in going after defendants who abuse their workplace positions by improperly profiting from their ventures.<\/p>\n
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Skilling claims there’s no way he violated the “honest services” demanded of his position because his conduct at Enron wasn’t to achieve private gain but rather to advance the company’s interests.<\/p>\n
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The justices heard a pair of similar cases about the “honest services” law in December. In both the government defended the law but at one point Justice Stephen Breyer expressed concern over its reach wondering how the government’s theory of the case “does not make this statute potentially criminalizing 100 million workers in the United States…?”<\/p>\n
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Breyer’s question mirrors the concern expressed by Justice Antonia Scalia who in an earlier case decried the law’s breadth by concluding it could logically be used by a rogue prosecutor to go after “a mayor\u2019s attempt to use the prestige of his office to obtain a restaurant table without a reservation; a public employee\u2019s recommendation of his incompetent friend for a public contract….Indeed, it would seemingly cover a salaried employee\u2019s phoning in sick to go to a ball game.”<\/p>\n
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The December cases involved a former Alaska lawmaker and former newspaper publisher Conrad Black.\u00a0 The justices have not returned an opinion in either case, likely waiting to hear arguments in the Skilling case before reaching any final conclusions.<\/p>\n
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The uncertainty of the law before the Court has forced the hand of prosecutors in Chicago who are hoping to put former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich on trial this summer.\u00a0 Blagojevich is accused of failing to provide “honest services” to the people of Illinois.\u00a0 Given the uncertainty of the law before the Court, Blagojevich’s lawyers asked the trial court judge to delay his case pending the outcome of the trio of “honest services” cases in Washington.\u00a0 Last month a grand jury returned a new indictment with additional charges to bolster the case against the ousted governor.<\/p>\n
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As for Skilling, because of sweeping nature of his crimes, a victory on the “honest services” part of his case is unlikely to do more than shave a few years off his sentence. However, there is a second unrelated issue he’s presenting to the Court about the make-up of the Houston jury pool that was called for his case.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Skilling argues he did not receive a fair trial because of the extensive publicity surrounding Enron’s collapse and the real life impact it had on the Houston community where he was tried. His lawyers argue that “Skilling not only was tried by jurors drawn from a community passionately committed to convicting him, but he was prosecuted under a vague statute that virtually ensured jurors would vindicate that objective.”<\/p>\n
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A number of media organization joined in a brief to the Court expressing concern that a ruling in Skilling’s favor on the jury issue could impact the standards by which future trials are left open to the public for news coverage.\u00a0 One of those entities, Dow Jones & Company, Inc. is the publisher of the Wall Street Journal and is owned by the parent company of Fox News.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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