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COMMENTARY
July 18, 2007
Black
Given my deadlines, I could have written about the verdict in the Chicago trial of Conrad Black in time for last Saturday’s paper, when it was hot news. Verily, I was tempted. But I make it a principle never to write anything for publication in the heat of anger. For I have found the sort of thing one writes in that state often strikes one later as imprudent.There is also a medical objection. Like many other people, I find the contemplation of a miscarriage of justice makes me physically ill; I like to give it time. If there is nothing whatever I can do about it, I might as well let it ride. I was somewhat surprised by the verdict: guilty on four of the lesser of the 13 counts, and thereby eligible for up to 35 years in jail. I say “somewhat” because, while I considered all the charges to be frivolous, I had become alarmed by the time the jury was taking to consider them, by the tone of the judge’s instructions to them, and by the fact the jury consisted of nine women and three men with no background in business. I began to realize that, while the prosecution had been a shambles, it had operated on a sound strategic principle. A friend explained that strategy: “In the USA judicial system, prosecutors play upon the American preference for compromise. They make an array of charges so that the jury will feel comfortable convicting on some and dismissing others. This is called being fair and balanced. My brother-in-law was the victim of a form of this. He worked for a company whose owners were indicted for fraudulent business practices. Brother-in-law was also indicted, although the prosecutors knew full well he was not guilty. They got the split decision they hoped for, and the owners went to jail. My brother-in-law was free to return to his home. Except he had no home. He had to sell it to pay for his legal defence.” I am personally familiar with too many cases, not only Stateside, in which this method of prosecution has been used to telling effect. I wish I could think of a single case in which the prosecutors themselves, or their litigious clients, had been called to account. The result, universally, is a legal system more likely to be employed in the persecution of the innocent, than in the conviction of the guilty. In such cases, for the most part, “the process is the punishment.” His enemies know that a man can be destroyed even before he has had his day in court. In Conrad Black’s case, his entire business empire was stripped away from him before the court case even began, and his prosecutors manoeuvred again and again to delay that reckoning, while depriving him of the means of defending himself. With very little capital to begin with, Conrad Black built a press empire of formidable size, but also remarkable quality. I can think of no press lord in history who showed such interest in the editorial improvement of his newspapers. In the course of building, he also made many nearly defunct properties into profitable businesses, chiefly for the benefit of other shareholders. Indeed, it was his persistent resourcefulness that was made into his undoing, for from the relatively small stock of his own capital, he retrieved a reasonable return on his enterprise through acknowledgement of capital gains. Did he earn this? You bet he did. Without Black, whose very flamboyance was a tool of trade, the business accomplishment was inconceivable, and many large fortunes would not have been made, both in the building it up and the taking it down. The spectacle of greedy, vindictive shareholders who had their reward, but wanted more, and found a way through the law to seize it, is starkly in contrast with the dignity Black has shown throughout his ordeal. He has been flamboyant and entertaining; yet he has also written books and journalism that show him to be a serious thinker on historical and political themes. He has consistently shown courage and audacity, and to this day, grace under terrible pressure. It should go without saying that he never consciously broke any law, and indeed, he invited in the corporate auditors who ultimately made a meal of him, because he was confident he had broken no laws. What is the conclusion? I should wish to have confidence of a legal remedy further down the road, but from what I have seen, I can have no confidence in the courts. Instead I think, as a Catholic Christian, one may only turn to the pulpit. We must not expect justice in this world. We must be willing to bear the pain of earthly injustice. And we must hope not only for our salvation, but for the vindication of justice, in the world to come.rn David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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