Lord Black hasn't yet started his appeals. That could take years--and he's 63.

Lawyers 'optimistic' about keeping Black out of prison

By Cahal Milmo
Published: 12 December 2007

Lawyers for the former newspaper publisher Conrad Black said they will try to keep him out of prison for up to another year as they seek to overturn the fraud convictions and the six-and-a-half year jail term imposed on him this week.

The life peer's legal team are expected to file appeal papers before Christmas. They insist there are multiple grounds to contest his convictions for obstructing justice and three counts of fraud by siphoning $6.1m from a media conglomerate that once included The Daily Telegraph.

In a move likely to anger prosecutors, who called for a term of more than 20 years, it was revealed that a court order will also be applied to allow the Canadian-born businessman to remain outside prison on a $21m bail bond until the end of appeal proceedings.

At his sentencing on Monday, Black, 63, was given three months to prepare for his time in a low-security jail, expected to be the Coleman facility in Florida. He is due to report there on 3 March and in the meantime will be confined to his Palm Beach mansion, three hours' drive to the south.

Andrew Frey, a member of Black's legal team specialising in appeals, saidthe process could last up to a year. Among the grounds being studied is a claim that prosecutors at the trial in Chicago failed to prove his intent to commit the offences. Mr Frey said: "There's no demonstration of criminal intent. There are ample and substantial grounds for appeal. We are reasonably optimistic.

"We are still in the process of studying the grounds but the most important of them is that the government failed to show proof of the mental elements of the crime. We don't think there's any evidence of any crime."

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Conservatives are right that their man, Conrad Black, has been treated unjustly - but it was conservative justice policies that brought him down, says Dan Gardner.

So Conrad Black has been sentenced to six-and-a-half years in the filthy confines of an American prison and conservatives are bitter. It was an unjust conviction, they say. The sentence is outrageous.

I think Mr. Black's defenders are -- largely -- correct. Politics certainly had a hand in his prosecution. The tactics used against him were abusive. The punishment he will endure is grotesque.

And for all this, Mr. Black can thank conservative justice policies -- the very policies promoted by his admirers and defenders, including some of his former newspapers. In that sense, Mr. Black has been -- to use an appropriately medieval phrase -- hoist by his own petard.

In an article he published in Maclean's last March, shortly before the trial began, Mr. Black blamed his prosecution on "two features of the American legal system only pallidly replicated in the U.K. or Canada: the plea bargain, and the criminal prosecution of corporations." Bang on. Unfortunately, though, Mr. Black missed the irony.

Unlike in Canada and the U.K., most American attorneys general are elected. So are many judges, prosecutors and sheriffs, and even unelected posts in the justice system are routinely used as stepping-stones to elected office. Canadian conservatives often praise this injection of democracy as a check on the power of the allegedly liberal judiciary. But they seldom note that it drags politics into the courtroom, which is why American justice is politicized to an extent unknown in other western countries.
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