My old courtroom comrade, CTV's Steven Skurka, suggests Conrad Black should swallow his medicine:

He should ponder the advice that Martha Stewart was given after the disastrous end of her trial. Her appellate counsel, including my good friend Marty Weinberg from Boston, persuaded Stewart to take the high road: forego an appeal and serve her rather lenient sentence. Conrad Black would be wise to consider a similar approach unless the grounds for appeal are particularly strong. He has a beautiful family and a supportive network of caring friends who I suspect will not abandon him. My free advice to him is to cast his material ambitions aside and treasure his good fortune.

I'm not sure there is a "high road" in US justice. I see in The National Post that Lord Black, convicted on four counts but acquitted on nine, will nevertheless be subject to something called "acquitted conduct sentencing enhancement". In other words, the stuff he's been acquitted of - the CanWest deal, the perks, the racketeering and tax fraud - can still be used against him:

At his sentencing hearing on Nov. 30, prosecutors are entitled to try to show on a "preponderance of the evidence" that Lord Black engaged in illegal conduct that it could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt. The preponderance of the evidence (known as the balance of probabilities in Canada) test is the much lower standard of proof used in civil trials and means that something is more likely true than not.

If the acquitted conduct evidence is accepted by Judge Amy St. Eve, it would be considered an aggravating factor that could significantly lengthen the sentence she imposes... The right of a judge to penalize acquitted conduct was approved by the U.S. Supreme Court a decade ago in the case of a California man convicted of crack cocaine possession, but acquitted by a jury of using a firearm in a drug offence. The trial judge found that the man possessed the weapon and increased the sentence to nearly 22 years in prison.

Geez, what a system. In effect, the "sentencing hearing" becomes another double-jeopardy racket. The Supreme Court in its decision said:

An acquittal on the criminal charges does not prove a defendant is innocent. It merely proves the existence of a reasonable doubt.

But hang on a minute. The entire premise of English law is that the defendant doesn't have to prove anything. You have to prove that he's guilty and, if you don't, that's it: he's not guilty. Whether you want to regard that as meaning "innocent" or (in the Scottish legal concept) "not proven" is up to you. But he's been tried for the offence and been acquitted. John Paul Stevens, not a Supreme Court justice I ordinarily have much time for, was quite right in his dissent from the majority:

The notion that a charge that cannot be sustained by proof beyond a reasonable doubt may give rise to the same punishment as if it had been so proved is repugnant.

Ah,  but quite a lot about this system is repugnant. In Maclean's this week, I write about the Feds' seizure of the $10 million proceeds from the sale of the Blacks' Park Avenue apartment. The government, you'll recall, argued that his purchase of the flat from Hollinger International in 2000 was a fraudulent transaction. On Friday, the defendant was acquitted of that charge. But the US government is still holding the money. They seized the proceeds of the crime before they'd proved there was any crime, and they're not going to let any rinky-dink technicality like a "not guilty" verdict stand in the way of justice.

From the pre-emptive seizure to the post-verdict "sentencing enhancement", the United States has upturned one of the bedrock principles of English law and now operates on a presumption of guilt. Repugnant indeed.