Balance of Prosecutorial Power

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Prosecutors and lawmakers will have to work harder now that the Supreme Court has narrowed the excessively broad federal “honest services” law. Any benefit the ruling gives to public and private miscreants — including Joseph Bruno, Rod Blagojevich and Jeffrey Skilling, who have been charged with or convicted of violating the law — should quickly inspire more thorough investigations and sharper new laws to combat corruption.

Passed in 1988, the law made it a federal crime, under the mail-fraud statute, “to deprive another of the intangible right of honest services.” Intangible was right; almost no one knew what the phrase actually meant. Prosecutors most often used it when they suspected that a politician had done something wrong but were not sure they could prove outright bribery or corruption.

In the dubious 2007 prosecution, for example, of Don Siegelman, a former governor of Alabama, the Justice Department claimed that a political contribution to a campaign to adopt a state lottery was actually a bribe to get Mr. Siegelman to appoint the contributor to a hospital board.

Since Mr. Siegelman, a Democrat, never actually received any money, the bribery case was hard to make. Instead, he was convicted of five counts of honest services fraud, one of bribery and one of obstruction. (The case had strong political overtones, and Mr. Siegelman’s appeal may be bolstered by Thursday’s ruling.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/25/opinion/25fri1.html?th&emc=th