Former Hollinger International chairman Conrad M. Black goes on trial in Chicago this week on various corporate criminal charges that he looted Hollinger. My post on the indictment from a year and a half ago is here, the NY Times article on the trial is here, and the WSJ’s Ashby Jones has a fun post on Black’s Canadian trial lawyer, Fast Eddie Greenspan. But Mark Steyn has the best analysis that I’ve seen to date on the case, which is another example of why the civil justice system is a better mechanism for allocating responsibilty for the alleged wrongs than the blunt force of the criminal justice system. Steyn concludes as follows:
Even if you concede that every charge against Black is true, it’s also somewhat disproportionate for the company to blow through a $200-million cost to the company of investigating it, for U.S. prosecutors to threaten him with a 95-year jail term, and for pusillanimous Canadian regulators to facilitate the collapse of Canadian companies.
Conrad and Barbara Black are easy targets — an orotund peer of the realm and his sinister Zionist trophy clothes horse. But they were good for readers, good for newspapers, and better for capitalism than a regime of arbitrary regulatory usurpation. What has happened to Hollinger is a disgrace. I hope Conrad Black is acquitted in Chicago. But there is much more at stake here than the fate of one man.
Tom–and Mark Steyn–are right on the money, as it were, about Conrad Black. Prosecutorial zealotry and the criminalization of corporate conduct by Congress have led to vast resources being wasted in witch hunts by attorneys like Patrick Fitzgerald, no, especially Patrick Fitzgerald. It is telling that all of the charges laid against Black have to do with secondary actions related to misdeeds that supposedly took place but for which in fact there is insufficient evidence. One can only hope Black is cleared of all charges but, alas, one strains to share his optimism about the outcome.
For an indepth look at the Conrad Black trial check out http://www.blacksjustice.com