Conrad Black Before the 9

God Bless the Supreme Court of the United States, which has just decided to hear the appeal of the press baron Conrad Black, who has for more than a year been imprisoned at a federal correctional facility at Coleman, Florida. It would be far premature to suggest that the court’s decision to hear Black’s appeal means that he will win the argument at the high court. But it certainly puts paid the idea that the courts should have, as they did, dismissed out of hand Black’s insistence that he was wrongly convicted and that serious errors were made in the trial that cast him into the penitentiary for what could be as much as 6 and ½ years.

The press baron was a founding director of this newspaper, in which his company, Hollinger International Inc., once owned a minority interest. He has, throughout his travail, maintained his innocence, insisting he would rather go to prison than plead guilty to crimes he did not commit. He was, in a stunning victory in July 2007, found not guilty of the most sensational — and serious — of the counts against him, including tax evasion and racketeering. In other words, the jury cleared him of the notion that he had run – as his detractors claimed — a “corporate kleptocracy.”

The editorial page of the Sun addressed the issues in his appeal in three pieces, which we post now for readers following the case. The first two were op-ed pieces by a distinguished lawyer, Michael Rips, once a clerk to Associate Justice Brennan. One appeared on April 21, 2008, under the headline “The Appeal of Conrad Black”; the other on on July 9, 2008, under the headline “Harmless Error?” An editorial, “Conrad Black’s Appeal,” was issued by the Sun on August 1, 2008. It stressed that the outcome of the case would be important not only for Black, an inspiriter of the Sun, but also for all corporate executives in America who look to the law to be clear and predictable.