High court to take up corruption law.

[elleng]

The Supreme Court this week will consider whether to apply the brakes to what critics have called a vague and limitless law that has proved essential to federal prosecutors going after corrupt politicians and greedy corporate executives.

The court has taken the unusual step of accepting three cases that raise challenges to a federal anti-fraud provision that has been key to the prosecutions of former lobbyist Jack Abramoff, former Illinois governor George Ryan (R) and executives involved in the collapse of Enron. The government is counting on using the provision to try to convict another former Illinois governor, Rod Blagojevich (D), of trying to auction off the U.S. Senate seat formerly held by President Obama.

At issue is the law's language that it is illegal for public or private employees to "deprive another of the intangible right of honest services." The flexible standard has been part of the law for more than 20 years, but lately it has been subject to a slew of contradictory lower-court rulings and criticism, not the least of which has come from Justice Antonin Scalia.

Last term, in dissenting from his colleagues' decision not to review the law, Scalia said the provision "invites abuse by headline-grabbing prosecutors in pursuit of local officials, state legislators and corporate C.E.O.'s who engage in any manner of unappealing or ethically questionable conduct."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/06/AR2009120602390.html?hpid=moreheadlines

[napi21]

1. I don't understand law? What honest services were claimed to

have been deprived?

[elleng]

2. 3 cases, 3 'services.'

'A 28 word amendment slipped into the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 created the crime, a congressional response to the Supreme Court's holding in McNally v. U.S. that a scheme to defraud did not cover "intangible rights." Well, Ronald Reagan fixed that. It reads:

For the purpose of this chapter, the term 'scheme or artifice to defraud' includes a scheme or artifice to deprive another of the intangible right of honest services.
The crime was directed toward political corruption, as a weapon against politicians who sold their good office and thus denied the public their honest services.

But crimes have a funny way of spinning out of their intended orbit, as imaginative prosecutors see the words applicable to a host of other circumstances. If a politician owes honest services to the public, doesn't an employee owe honest services to an employer?'


http://blog.simplejustice.us/2008/07/31/stealing-the-intangible-right-to-honesty.aspx

[napi21]

3. Surely that's not the only law stating you can't get personal

compensation for trying to sell an office? I also doubt that's the only crime they're planning on charging Blogo with!