Monday, September 04, 2023

Another sketchy white collar prosecution thrown out

 This time its the soccer prosecutions in EDNY.  From the AP:

A federal judge threw out the convictions of a former Fox executive and a South American sports media and marketing company in the FIFA bribery investigation, citing a May decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in a case involving an aide to former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

U.S. District Judge Pamela K. Chen, who presided over the trial in Brooklyn federal court, granted a motion for an acquittal in a 55-page decision filed Friday night.

Hernan Lopez, the former CEO of Fox International Channels, was convicted on March 9 along with the marketing company Full Play Group SA of one count each of wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy related to the Copa Libertadores club tournament.

Full Play was convicted of two additional counts each of wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy related to World Cup qualifiers and friendlies and to the Copa América, the continent’s national team championship.

***

“The Supreme Court’s latest wire fraud decisions — especially Percoco — and the absence of precedent applying honest services wire fraud to foreign commercial bribery, requires this court to find that (the statute) does not criminalize the conduct alleged in this case and that therefore the evidence at trial was insufficient to sustain defendants’ convictions under that statute,” Chen wrote.

She added: “Defendants’ convictions for money laundering, predicated on their honest services wire fraud convictions, also cannot be sustained. The court therefore grants defendants’ motions to acquit on all counts of conviction.”

 In other news, some inmates are playing D&D while others are listening to Taylor Swift.  We should be giving inmates iPads and phones so that they can make the most of their time in prison.

In news closer to home, Judge Rosenberg dismissed a case on standing grounds where the merits issue was whether the 14th Amendment barred Trump from running for President.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

"We should be giving inmates iPads and phones so that they can make the most of their time in prison."

Lots of inmates already have phones in prison. They use them to access pornography and run fraud and sextortion scams from prison.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndal/pr/seven-indicted-role-prison-based-phone-scam-and-paying-bribes-corrections-officers

https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news/collect-call-from-prison-scams-snagging-two-categories-of-victims-091015.html

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/11/11/how-did-they-run-an-elaborate-sextortion-scam-from-prison-cellphones

And for the ones serving life without parole or on death row, it's not like they are ever going to be released to become law-abiding productive members of society. Their time in prison is all the time they have left on earth.

Anonymous said...

https://casetext.com/case/united-states-v-patel-211

Anonymous said...

Yep. Rudy crushed that guy.

Anonymous said...

Smith just granted a rule 29 after stripping the US of the conspiracy count... impartiality out the door, bias is showing!!