Legal News

With New Filing, Scrushy?s Legal Battle Forges On

By Dan Slater

Let’s call it Part III of Richard Scrushy’s Legal Saga: In 2005, the DOJ failed to secure a conviction of Scrushy for the accounting fraud at HealthSouth, the company he founded. Then, a year ago, prosecutors vindicated the loss by winning a nearly seven year prison sentence for Scrushy on bribery charges. Now, in an 118-page brief filed recently to the Eleventh Circuit, Scrushy is seeking to overturn his corruption conviction, saying in part that jurors violated court rules by communicating with each other by e-mail. Here’s the AP report, and here’s commentary from the White Collar Crime Prof blog, where you’ll find a link to the brief.

A bit of background: Last June, Judge Mark Fuller sentenced Scrushy (right) and former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman (left) to prison for a scheme in which Scrushy arranged a $500,000 donation to a foundation established by Siegelman in exchange for a spot on a state hospital regulatory board. (Siegelman, who received a prison term of more than seven years, filed his appeal last month. Last week a group of 54 former state AG’s also filed a brief on Siegelman’s behalf.)

“The evidence was insufficient to establish that Scrushy’s political contribution to assist the campaign for an Alabama lottery supporting education was made in return for an explicit promise by Governor Siegelman that the ‘quid pro quo’ for the contribution was an appointment to the Alabama Certificate of Need Board,” Scrushy’s brief says.

But the most significant ground for appeal seems to be the intra-jury communications, as well as the jury’s use of information from the Internet during deliberations.

Attorneys for Siegelman say they received copies of e-mails that appeared to have been sent between jurors during the trial. The Scrushy brief said Fuller erred by not investigating to determine if the e-mails were authentic. “These e-mails, if authentic, show the jurors were discussing and deciding the guilt or innocence of defendants by e-mail on a weekend during deliberations,” the brief said. It added that the questions concerning e-mail deliberations “demanded further investigation, and the failure to do so requires a new trial.”

Chief prosecutor Louis Franklin said he had no comment on Scrushy’s appeal. “We’ll respond in the courtroom,” Franklin said.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on June 04, 2008 (boomark / email).