VIEWPOINT: At last, Conrad may be freed

Like him or not, there’s no way Conrad Black was guilty of any criminal act. He’s among the wrongly convicted by out-of-control prosecutors who aggrandize themselves at the expense of celebrities.

By Frank Touby –

I’m heartened to learn that my fellow media mogul, Conrad Black, has won a hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court on his wrongful conviction of charges laid by a glory-seeking Chicago prosecutor. Now it’s certainly true that Conrad has lost much public sympathy because of his elitist, arrogant attitudes (not entirely wrongly held) and occasionally swine-like mistreatment of lesser mortals.

But most people do continually grow, and if there’s any karmic-style justice to the official injustice perpetrated against Conrad, it’s in the forced associations he must have and accommodations he must make with ordinary—even reprehensible—people. That’s thanks to a 6-1/2 year prison term a deluded judge laid on him.

Conrad has shown that he has accommodated his unjust fate with admirable élan. It is of course maddening to that victim of judicial lynching to be convicted of ripping off shareholders when it was court-appointed guardians who cashed his company in and demolished its share value.

It’s equally maddening to be convicted of obstruction of justice when recovering his records and papers in the wake of an eviction from his former office. They were papers, by the way, the U.S. government had already seen.

Perhaps most painful of all, he was convicted of defrauding his shareholders by selling his personal pledge not to compete with a purchaser of the corporation’s newspaper assets.

That’s not a rip off. Would you want to buy a newspaper from that publicly held corporation if Conrad—a proven expert at competing in that industry—exercised his personal right to start a competing newspaper against you? His pledge not to do so is worth a bundle.

There is great hope for U.S. justice that the high court will examine the prosecutor bonanza law that triggered this awful mess. Sadly for justice, prosecutors are lawyers and lawyers want to win. Period.

What won’t be on the high court’s table is whether Conrad in any way obstructed justice in taking his own property from the premises he was being evicted from. (I lack Conrad’s staggering and pontifical skills with the language, and thus must end that sentence with a preposition.)

It will be good to see that remarkable man again walking the streets, gracing the TV screen with his wit and knowledge, lambasting common swine such as I in print and spoken word, and continuing his exhaustive accounts of the world’s history (even if he does sometimes lionize villains such as Richard Nixon).