Washington attorney Alykhan Velshi writing in this New English Review op-ed examines the Conrad Black indictment and doesn’t like what he sees:

The trial by attrition of Conrad Black has exposed the dark underbelly of the legal system, where the government can ruin a man, take his property, his means of livelihood, and make him a social pariah ñ all without the hassle of securing a conviction. There is an insidious little worm that has crept into the legal system, an iconoclastic mentality that is distorting the rule of law. Focused less on securing justice than on bringing down the high and mighty, all the while pandering to the politics of envy, it affects the entire system of corporate governance.
This is highlighted by three developments in the law of corporate governance: the concentration of power in the hands of minority shareholders, the criminalization of technical regulatory violations, the abandonment of the rule of law in favor of aggressive prosecutorial tactics, and the entrenchment of a culture that penalizes success.

Velshi doesn’t get everything right, but his piece is nevertheless worth reading for his analysis of the troubling (and all-too-common) characteristics of the Black prosecution. Check it out.