Black's Fate Back in Court
From the prosecution’s viewpoint virtually everything in the case against Conrad Black has fallen apart, yet he still faces the prospect of being sent back to jail.
In the bad old days of the Soviet Union and its show trials, an effective way to get innocent people to confess to spying for unnamed countries (usually Britain) was to alternate severe punishment with benign treatment.
When lenient conditions were imposed on those who stubbornly resisted torture and refused to admit to treason, it was found that the spectre of returning to brutal conditions could break the spirit of the most resolute men.
In his Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn told of one officer who resisted all tortures – but succumbed when his face was immersed in a bucket of human spit. This was so disgusting to him, that death was preferable. He was quickly shot.
When all accused eventually confessed, were put on trial and executed, outlets like the New York Times wondered why they confessed if they were innocent.
In a way, this seems to be what is happening to Conrad Black – not as deliberate policy, as was done in Stalin’s Soviet Union, but by default by the American justice system which portrays itself as fair and compassionate but too often is merciless and vindictive.
Not by accident does the U.S. have more of its citizens behind bars than any other country and, ironically, more wrongly convicted people later released from prison when subsequent evidence, like DNA findings, have proved their innocence.
At his most recent court appearance, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals denied Conrad’s request for a full board hearing on the decision to throw out two of three fraud convictions that the U.S. Supreme Court wanted dropped.
So after some eight months of paroled freedom, and 28 months of prison, Conrad is to be re-sentenced and in theory could to sent back to jail complete the remaining 50 months of his initial 6½ year sentence.
Steve Skurka, a Canadian lawyer who has followed the case and is writing a book on it, told the CBC he thinks (hopes?) Conrad has served his last day in jail. He expects he may be re-sentenced to four or six months, but maybe not served in a federal prison.
Skurka has always taken an optimistic view, and is right more often than wrong.
Conrad, himself, says he didn’t expect much from the Appeals Court. He and his lawyer, Miguel Estrada, have another motion for the Supreme Court to consider.
A problem is that Conrad Black seems a pawn caught in the midst of a feud between the Appeals Court and the Supreme Court. The question now, is whether having given its view that three fraud convictions were wrong, will the Supremes now bow down to the Appeal Court’s decision that they were wrong?
Looking back, from the prosecution’s viewpoint virtually everything in the case against Conrad Black has gone wrong or fallen apart. The original 17 charges against him resulted in four convictions, two of which were later thrown out.
What went to Chicago as a $60 million fraud case, is now a disputed $600,000 fraud. And the obstruction charges seem absurd if one concludes there was no crime committed – and that U.S. prosecutors already had copies of the documents Black removed from his Toronto Street headquarters when he was, in a sense, evicted.
One hopes lawyer Skurka is right in his assessment, otherwise Conrad is facing a fate mindful of the old Soviet Union - minus a bullet in the brain.
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