NMissCommentor

As I posted a while ago, the U.S. Supreme Court has accepted cert in a case involving the “honest services” bribery statute.  There are actually two cases before the court, one involving an Alaska legislator and the other Canadian newspaperman Conrad Black.  The issue of the scope of federal statute criminalizing the denial of “honest services” of a state official to its citizens was going to be an issue in the DeLaughter case before the guilty plea; it was pretty clear that one of the reasons Chicago lawyer Tom Durkin got in the case was his experience in that area, particularly in a case in which the Supreme Court denied cert in March over a dissent by Justice Scalia.

Adam Liptak writes about this issue before the U.S. Supreme Court today in the New York Times:

In February, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that federal prosecutors had developed an unseemly crush on a particularly vague law, one that “has been invoked to impose criminal penalties upon a staggeringly broad swath of behavior.”

Justice Scalia was writing to protest the Supreme Court’s decision not to hear an appeal from three city officials in Chicago who had been convicted of violating the law, which makes it a crime “to deprive another of the intangible right of honest services.”

If you can make sense of that phrase, you have achieved something that has so far eluded the nation’s appeals courts.

“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.

Continue reading Adam Liptak on the “honest services” bribery cases before the US Supreme Court