As you can see our feature story is about Thursday’s Supreme Court decision that could have a big effect on future public corruption cases and will quite likely end up letting a good number of convicted public officials out of prison. That’s definitely true. But it’s not the whole story. We cover public corruption cases pretty closely. And over the years I’ve been persuaded that the “honest services” statute or more specifically the interpretation of it being used by the Justice Department really is too broad.
You can see my layman’s description of the law here. I’ll be wise and not try to explain the technical details or the different equities in play. (I think we’ll try to convene a group of experts who can help us dig into the subject further.). For now though suffice it to say there are legitimate arguments that what the Court did here was the right thing.
