Siegelman Appears on Fox News, Again…
December 8th, 2009Former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman made his case once again on Fox News on Tuesday. He is hoping the U.S. Supreme Court will take up his conviction in a review of the law against honest services mail fraud.
The Supreme Court is considering about a half-dozen cases on the rights of people accused of crimes involving drugs, sex and corruption, and could consider the conviction of Siegelman and his co-defendant Richard Scrushy as part of that review.
Civil liberties groups and associations of defense lawyers have lined up on the side of the accused, but so have conservative, libertarian and business groups. Their briefs and public statements are signs of an emerging consensus on the right and left that the criminal justice system is an aspect of big government that must be contained, according to The New York Times, giving Siegelman supporters hope that his case may also be considered for the counts involving the law against “honest services mail fraud,” what critics call an over-broad and vague statute the court should strike down.
This so-called “overcriminalization” is at the heart of the conservative critique of crime policy, and even the conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce made the argument in a recent friend-of-the-court brief about a federal law often used to prosecute corporate executives and politicians. The law, which makes it a crime for officials to defraud their employers of “honest services,” is, the brief said, both “unintelligible” and “used to target a staggeringly broad swath of behavior.”
There’s no concrete word on when the high court may announce a decision in those cases. If the court refuses to hear the case, Siegelman will face Chief U.S. District Judge Mark E. Fuller again in Montgomery for re-sentencing, if he refuses to grant a motion for a new trial.
