Must read George Jonas:
The prosecutors who set out to railroad Conrad and his co-defendants didn’t lack zeal and energy. What they lacked was evidence. From their initial allegation that my friend and his colleagues stole some US$80-million from the stockholders of Hollinger International — itself a vast reduction from a pre-trial smear campaign about the theft of hundreds of millions — District Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald’s chastened team withdrew another US$20-million as the trial progressed. What the jurors took with them into the jury room at the end involved the alleged misappropriation of some US$60-million.
What they came out with, after many days of deliberation, was US$6.1-million — in monetary terms, about 10% of the prosecution’s case. They acquitted on 90%. Of course, a 10% victory for the prosecution is still a 100% defeat for the defense. All defendants were sentenced to varying terms (and types) of incarceration, which led to last week’s appeal.
It was no great surprise that the jurors had thrown out nine of 13 charges against Conrad. Lead prosecutor Eric Sussman (now in private practice) had a vivid imagination but no hand. He couldn’t sell the jurors on Conrad having spent some US$60-million of the stockholders’ money through racketeering schemes, phony non-compete agreements, birthday parties, or holidays in the South Seas for a simple reason: The evidence went the other way. The surprise was that Sussman and his team somehow managed to juggle the cards in their non-existent hand into making twelve citizens believe that there was 1) evidence on which they could find that Conrad obstructed justice, and 2) evidence that Conrad and his co-accused dipped their hands in the till to the tune of US$5.5-million in one transaction and about US$600,000 in another.
But there was no such evidence. If anything, there was evidence to the contrary.
Jonas has been one of the lone voices of sanity in the national press throughout this saga.
# posted by Adam Daifallah : 7:42 PM
