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When a former 21st Century Fox executive and an Argentine sports marketing company were convicted in March after a seven-week soccer corruption trial in New York City, federal prosecutors hailed the verdict as a “resounding victory for justice and for soccer fans around the world.”
But that was before the U.S. Supreme Court made it even more difficult for prosecutors to bring fraud cases.
Following those heralded convictions of Hernán Lopez and Full Play Group SA, the justices issued rulings in unrelated cases that led the judge presiding over the soccer case to reverse course.
A federal jury in Brooklyn had convicted Lopez and Full Play of wire fraud and money laundering conspiracies in connection with alleged schemes to bribe high-ranking soccer executives for media and broadcasting rights to lucrative tournaments.
The disputes were the latest cases in which the justices took a narrower view than prosecutors of the scope of federal fraud statutes.
Then, in those unrelated cases in May, the Supreme Court ruled for defendants in two political corruption cases from New York, Percoco v. United States and Ciminelli v. United States. The disputes were the latest cases in which the justices took a narrower view than prosecutors of the scope of federal fraud statutes.
According to U.S. District Judge Pamela Chen, an upshot of that latest Supreme Court precedent, as applied to the soccer case, is that the law used to convict the defendants doesn’t apply to allegations of foreign commercial bribery.
So on Friday, Chen granted acquittals for Lopez and Full Play. The U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York was reviewing the decision, a spokesperson said Saturday.
Although before trial the Court rejected some of the same legal arguments Defendants now renew in their post-trial motions, because of intervening Supreme Court decisions signaling limits on the scope of the honest services wire fraud statute, the Court grants Defendants’ motions and vacates their convictions.
In light of the Supreme Court’s 6-3 GOP supermajority, I should point out that the high court’s skepticism of expansive fraud prosecutions hasn’t fallen along partisan lines. Indeed, the justices’ recent votes on the subject have mostly been unanimous. Of course, that doesn’t make them correct — they just have the last word.
At any rate, because prosecutors are still unlikely to stop going after what they see as corrupt conduct, don’t expect this case to be the last one to effectively test the law’s limits.