Legal News

Nacchio To Remain Free, At Least for the Moment

By Ashby Jones

Earlier this week, we compared Joe Nacchio’s fight to stay out of prison to a man careening out of control down a river toward a waterfall. Terrified of what awaits, the man grabs, kicks, flails at whatever he can in attempts to avoid his fate.

Well, at least for the moment, Nacchio, the former chief executive at Qwest Communications, has grabbed himself a vine. A federal judge in Denver, Marcia Krieger, will allow Nacchio to stay free until she looks over his attorney’s soon-to-be filed petition to the Supreme Court to review his case. Nacchio, convicted in April of 2007 on multiple insider-trading charges, had been scheduled to report next Monday to a federal prison in Minersville, Pa., to begin serving a six-year sentence.

Nacchio’s attorney, Maureen Mahoney, plans to file a petition on Friday. People familiar with the case said it's possible the judge could look over the filing and decide Nacchio should report to prison as planned. But in a court hearing Thursday, Judge Krieger indicated she wanted to allot time for its review. Neither prosecutors nor defense attorneys commented on the judge's ruling. There is no date set for her to make a ruling.

Since his conviction, Nacchio has endured a roller-coaster ride through the court system. An appellate panel first tossed out his conviction but was overruled by the full 10th Circuit Court of Appeals last month.

Since then Nacchio's appellate attorney Maureen Mahoney has made a flurry of filings aimed at keeping him out of prison including, one seeking to delay the start of his sentence so a doctor could check out a lump on his leg he feared might be cancerous. The lump turned out to be benign, and Judge Krieger ruled prison doctors could adequately handle his medical care.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 19, 2009 (boomark / email).