Conrad Black: My prison education | Hacker News Reader

Conrad Black: My prison education

fullcomment.nationalpost.com

67 pointscubix39 comments

A couple great quotes:

"I had seen at close range the injustice of sentences one hundred times more severe for crack cocaine than for powder cocaine, a straight act of discrimination against African-Americans, that even the first black president and attorney general have only ameliorated with tepid support for a measure, still being debated, to reduce the disparity of sentence from 100 to one to 18 to one."

I'm honestly surprised (& pleased) he would say that outright. I'm not particularly familiar with the workings of the U.S. justice system but a disparity of 100 to one sounds fairly unjust.

"America’s 2.4 million prisoners, and millions more awaiting trial or on supervised release, are an ostracized, voiceless legion of the walking dead; they are no one’s constituency."

This quote makes loads of sense when you consider that in the American justice system, prosecutors win over 90% of their cases (a point mentioned by Black).

In summary, I love that Conrad Black wrote this article. Most in his position wouldn't have.

"I'm honestly surprised (& pleased) he would say that outright. I'm not particularly familiar with the workings of the U.S. justice system but a disparity of 100 to one sounds fairly unjust." You sound prejudiced against American justice if you can be pleased that he takes a certain position on something that you are unfamiliar with. Part of the reason why there's a 90% success rate (if that is the case) might be that prosecutors in many jurisdictions are instructed to only pursue cases they believ are winnable

Prosecutors win over 99% (99.2% in 2007 [1]) cases in Russia.

[1]: http://www.forbesrussia.ru/forbes/issue/2008-11/7199-nevinov...

It's not much of an argument in favor of the status quo to say it could have been worse. The North Korean regime has a worse censorship record than China, but that doesn't make the situation in China any less troubling.

What's your target?

In a perfect world, a prosecutor only brings a case if they have enough evidence to have a reasonable expectation of winning. I honestly don't know if 90% is a problem, but the natural knee-jerk "fair" outcome of 50% would actually mean that half the time, a prosecutor is bringing a case that they shouldn't have. That sounds like an awfully high rate of false charges to me.

90% doesn't sound so wrong to me, and I don't think that's where the problem lies. The problem is the breadth and variety of ways in which the prosecutor can bring a successful case against you.

(This is important because if we're going to push for reform, we want to push for the right things, not just kneejerk that everything is wrong every time we see a statistic.)

Agreed, the statistic bears further exploration and analysis. A figure like 99% percent does raise some eyebrows, and I would argue, so does 90%. But we shouldn't leave it there.

Interesting. I bet this rate would be a useful element in a corruptness index for countries.

Over seven nines of charged cases in Japan most years. 100 pct of all jury trials ever. Do we win? (I do not think it is a very useful metric. Japan has a problem, but it is forcing confessions as the sole investigatory tactic, not corruption. The conviction rates for any Western democracy should be ninety plus, or prosecutors are bringing cases they should know are insufficient, to the detriment of the public and innocent alike.)

I agree that it's not a very useful metric. On the confessions: Japanese police can detain suspects and question them days on end without allowing them to talk to a lawyer.

I'd model a criminal conviction as indicative of one of four possibilities:

1) Defendant is guilty and the police did their job right, bringing strong evidence to the prosecutor. 2) Defendant is innocent, but there's a weight of misinterpreted evidence that his defense fails to overcome. 3) Defense is exceptionally shoddy in the face of an average-to-weak prosecutorial case. 4) Corruption.

To disentangle the effects of gains in (1) & (4) on increases in the conviction rate, you need a metric of police efficiency that's unaffected by corruption.

For instance, a country with DNA or fingerprint forensics will have a higher conviction rate than one without DNA/fingerprints, but as a result of solid police work, not as a result of corruption.

Not to distract from the point but if crack users are 100 times more likely to commit other crimes (theft/assault) as a result of their crack use then this is a "fair" sentence.

It's all banalities. Standard lefty talking points. And of course, it's a lie. "100 to 1"?

http://politics.usnews.com/news/national/articles/2007/10/01...

In 2006, crack cocaine sentences were 43.5 percent longer than powder cocaine sentences; the average length of imprisonment for powder cocaine offenders was 84.7 months, while crack cocaine-related imprisonments averaged 121.5 months.

Conrad Black would be amused at your description of him as a lefty. This guy founded a newspaper specifically to combat what he called "soft, left pap" in the Canadian journalism scene. He and his wife are so retrograde they are open admirers of the monarchy and nostalgic for the British class system.

There is a disease in American politics of attacking the position for potentially being consonant with a particular ideology. Call it the ad ideologicem fallacy.

Like, if this statement could be said by a left-winger, it must not be true, even if it's made by someone with actual experience or data.

Maybe his 100 to 1 statement is factually wrong, or perhaps that was just hyperbole. The main issue is that there's any disparity at all between drug sentences.

If Conrad Black is a 'standard lefty' in the US, you poor bastards must have the most nihilistic hegemonic fascist right-wing government to ever exist. Frankly, if Black is a lefty, it must have taken all of the gods recorded in human history working to their max to suppress the rightist powers in the American system from going supra-Nazi-fascist-zombie-monster and destroying all non-Aryans.

Seriously, Black is a super-right wing nut job. Please, check your own facts before making outright ludicrous claims as calling him a lefty. Seriously, I hope Canada doesn't take him back because we've already got enough right-wing fraudsters running our country, we don't need another one to come back and help bolster their ranks.

The 100 to 1 sentencing disparity is in the amount of drug which triggers the five year mandatory minimum sentence: 5 grams in the case of crack, 500 grams in the case of powder.

See http://www.drugpolicy.org/drugwar/mandatorymin/crackpowder.c... for more.

I've followed this case over the years and it's completely in character to see that he has no remorse whatsoever. He had been draining funds from his company, Hollinger International, into his own pockets for years. Shareholder pressure forced an investigation by the board, upon which he resigned, and was subsequently convicted for securities fraud. And of course he now describes himself as one of the "people, who, like me, would never dream of committing a crime...".

Notwithstanding his personal shortcomings, he's right about sentencing and the public defender system. Not that he has to worry about that!

You know I got the other sense from this article. He doesn't want to show remorse because he wants to appear strong; a resilient rock against the ravages of other mere mortals. Yet, he knows that he did something wrong. He saw the pain and suffering of others up close and personal at a huge stretch of time for 2 years, and this is his way of dealing with guilt.

Somewhere in his mind he sincerely believes that by speaking on the behalf of these people he is making a form of penance.

I feel sad for him.

According to the indictment, he wasn't charged with securities fraud (§1348) but with mail fraud (§1341), wire fraud (§1343), and honest services fraud (§1346).

Black's lawyers have an interesting note about the appeal here: http://www.gibsondunn.com/Publications/Pages/USSupremeCourtT...

As I understand it, Black negotiated a huge management fee authorized by Hollinger's board. The board figured-out they'd made a bad deal. Black got greedier and tried to get the management fee re-characterized as a non-compete to avoid Canadian taxes. The board schemed to get rid of Black and get the fees rescinded. The SEC got involved, the IRS got involved. The Hollinger board members with government savvy (e.g., Henry Kissinger) ran away when the US Attorney (Fitzgerald) got involved. The others cowered and said whatever necessary to keep them from becoming targets of the grand jury investigation. Radler fell into Fitzgerald's arms and sang whatever song kept him out of Lompoc. Black, Kipnis, and Boultbee were convicted on 1 of 11 counts: depriving the company they were running (Hollinger) of its right to honest services (§1346) and using the mail (§1341) and telephone to (§1343) do so.

Honest services is defined in § 1346, which reads in total "For the purposes of this chapter, the term “scheme or artifice to defraud” includes a scheme or artifice to deprive another of the intangible right of honest services." But the feds have been broadening the case law since the 1940s and use it as a catch all for corruption and fraud cases. It's so broad that every justice from Ginsberg to Scalia just called it unconstitutionally broad. It's broad enough to cover a lot of everyday business deals.

Fitzgerald spent a lot of effort detailing Black's lifestyle and Hollinger's willingness to subsidize it; but Hollinger's board was aware of and approved those subsidies. My feeling is that the jury figured someone who lived Black's lifestyle at the expense of a company was doing something wrong and the only thing in the indictment that fit was the overly-broad honest services fraud: shareholder-supported-lifestyle fraud, the same thing that got one of the Enron guys. Those kinds of arrangements are wrong and inefficient; but probably shouldn't be illegal, lest a whole bunch of other common business practices become scrutinized, regulated, and outlawed.

"Veterans of even 20 years in the federal prison system could not recall anyone being bailed in mid-sentence like this, and particularly not on the heels of unanimous Supreme and Circuit Appeals Court decisions."

The justice system evidently works in mysterious ways for rich, connected neoconservatives. Conrad Black's fraud was blatant, he hid and destroyed evidence of it, and has shown no remorse. After siphoning more than $6M of money from the company, he served a little over two years. $3M/year is a pretty good salary for living in minimum security prison.

Evidence, please?

There are a number of citations in the references to the Wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Conrad_Black

The only difference between Black and normal people in the justice system is that Black has the resources to make it a fair fight.

I applaud Black for fighting it all the way and because he fought it all the way this one of many egregious statutes will no longer be used to put innocent people in jail. If the state could have proved a fraud charge they would have, but they couldn't. You don't get unanimous supreme court victories by accident. The law was clearly illegal.

Lord Black is an example Canadians should hold high who rejected his country by giving up citizenship rather than letting politics get in the way of much deserved honours. He is a true patriot.

Lord Black is not a Canadian patriot. A patriot would not have given his citizenship up for power and dubious honours. There are things that COULD have been done without forcing the loss of his citizenship, such as honourary knighthoods. Instead, he decided he wanted something explicitly prohibited by Canadian law.

I believe that Conrad Black committed fraud; I also believe he was railroaded by the American legal system. It's good that he can fight this because he has money and powerful friends, but America should do better. I find it interesting that Black decries the public defender system (and it IS broken) but offers no ideas for what could fix or replace it.

It's not prohibited by law. Canadian law has no jurisdiction in other countries.

Also, if titular honors are prohibited by foreign governments why do we have a Queen?

A quick search shows up the Nickle Resolution:

http://www.canadianencyclopedia.ca/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Pa... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_titles_debate

Canadians are (like Americans, although for different reasons) prohibited from accepting foreign titles. That's pretty much "against the law" to me.

It's not earth shattering, but it's an interesting look at the broken criminal system (can't call it a justice system...) from the type of guy who is rarely in a position to really see it.

"I have learned more of the fallibility of American justice, which does convict many people, who, like me, would never dream of committing a crime in a thousand years."

It is amazing the number of people who commit white collar crime [1] make the claim that they would not dream of committing crime. White collar crime is as inexcusable as any other.

[1] obstruction of justice and honest services fraud in this instance. As I understand it, the US supreme court ordered a review of the applicability of honest services fraud. From wikipedia Quote "The jailed former media baron's obstruction of justice conviction, for which he is serving a concurrent 6 ½ year sentence, remains in place."

Tho, the rest of the article is well written, I wonder if he considers himself to be small fry, since he states "A trillion dollars have been spent, a million easily replaceable small fry are in prison", tho not in the context of white collar crime.

Need less to say, he is big fry getting away with crime. Context is everything.

An interesting blog to follow, by a white collar criminal, is White Collar Fraud: http://whitecollarfraud.blogspot.com/

I hate to say it, since this guy clearly must have suffered a lot, but this is just not a very well written article.

At no point does he try to explain who he is or why he was in prison. You get the idea that he was falsely accused, and you learn (at excruciating length) that he's been released, but no details as to the how and why of either event.

Then, 1000 words in, just when he's ready to tell you some of the interesting things that happened to him in prison (hence the title of the article), it just ends.

Really disappointing. I want my ten minutes back.

Black founded the National Post and his trial was extensively covered in Canada (and even in the US). He's quite right to presume that his audience know who he is and (roughly) why he was in prison. As for how the article's written, your objection is really to the headline, which is scoped somewhat inaccurately. The article itself is written fine. (And I would have said one of its main points is that he didn't really suffer a lot.)

It's interesting that this prominent arch-conservative is, through personal experience, now citing facts and making arguments that are unfortunately nearly exclusively those of the left. It's like the old line, "a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged", in reverse. I wonder if he will do anything about it in the future.

Prisons are a dark corner of American politics where everyone's uninformed preferences produced a system that's bloated, expensive, inefficient and doesn't meet its stated goals.

California's prisons are a good example: law and order on the right; tax and spend on the left; public sector unions throughout; massive waste, individual and systemic injustice the result.

I'd always heard it as "a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested.'

Why should the reader of a newspaper (or is it a magazine?) be expected to know who founded it?

I hadn't realized that this was a newspaper article, but if so that actually makes it worse. A journalist should know how to write in such a way that people don't require external context to process a story.

It should more be considered as an opinion/ccolumn, as opposed to a news story (you'll notice it's in the 'Full Comment' section of the paper). It's also not a one-off piece; since he's been in jail, Conrad Black has continued to write these columns for (what was formerly) his paper about life in prison, what he's been up to, and general news issues of the day.

In short, this shouldn't be considered (and wasn't intended) as a news report on life in prison, but rather one person's account of what life was like for them.

Indeed, as the above mentioned, he founded the Post.

Followers of the story (largely, Canada and UK) have seen quite a drama over the last few years. It's helpful to understand he is, in fact, a British Lord - after renouncing Canadian citizenship under a Prime Minister blocking the appointment due to a personal vendetta - and was convicted of defrauding shareholders under a law recently deemed by SCOTUS as open-ended and unconstitutional.

It's worth pointing out that Black sued the Government of the day over blocking his peerage (Black v. Chretien) and lost. So while he may say that it was a personal vendetta that caused him to renounce his citizenship, it's not like he didn't have a recourse to due process.

As for his conviction, it was both for honest-services fraud (which SCOTUS is in the process of unravelling), as well as for obstruction of justice - brought on by, among other things, being caught on a security tape removing (with the assistance of his chauffeur) a number of boxes of documents from his former office without court permission and in the middle of an investigation.

He removed those boxes from his office in Toronto. Since when does US law have jurisdiction in Canada?

Thanks for that. Your one sentence did a better job of summing up what was going on than the whole article. I wish he could have worked it into the story at some point, so that the rest of us could figure out what he was talking about.

I can guarantee that there isn't a person in Canada that reads the National Post that doesn't know who Conrad Black is. I actually appreciate that they didn't waste my time with any backstory. I think in this day and age people can google shit if they want backstory.

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