Ellen Podgor addresses Supreme Court push back against public corruption prosecutions
By Richard Wolf
USA Today
Jan. 13, 2020
Excerpt
What’s clearer is the [Supreme] court’s impatience with federal and state prosecutors, even in cases of political corruption.
Four years ago, the court vacated the conviction of former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell, who had been sentenced to two years in prison for accepting luxury gifts and loans from a wealthy businessman in exchange for “official acts.” The justices ruled unanimously that those acts were commonplace actions taken on behalf of constituents.
The ruling made it harder for prosecutors to use federal fraud statutes against public officials by characterizing what the justices called common favors as crimes. That could work against the Trump administration in the New Jersey case.
“A good number of the recent cases are examples of where prosecutors stretched the law,” says Ellen Podgor, a white-collar crime research professor at Stetson University College of Law.
The complete article was originally published on the USA Today website on Jan. 13, 2020, with the headline, “Supreme Court’s war on prosecutors meets ‘Bridgegate’.”
Post date: Jan. 13, 2020
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