I'm getting a lot of mail along these lines:

It's nice to see you so concerned for the well being of a convict.  I hope that your compassion extends to others besides Conrad Black (and, naturally, convicted perjurer Scooter Libby).

Perhaps you could spend some time, and ink, lamenting the cruel and unfair circumstances that have led so many into prison based on mandatory minimum sentences and "third strike" laws.

Or are you only outraged by the excesses of the justice system when bloated children of privilege are the victims?

Just wondering.

Well, it's true that, until this assignent came along, I wasn't doing a lot of court reporting. However, in 1995 in the then Conrad-run British Spectator, I took up the case of a small-town Vermont lawyer who had the Drug Enforcement hotshots descend on him from the skies - with choppers and full commando gear - at five in the morning. They'd arrested some small-time dope-peddling loser client of his and had leaned on him to toss 'em some names in order to get a better deal. He ran out of real druggie names pretty quickly, and so had no one left to sell out but his attorney. The DEA charged him with laundering the proceeds of drug money, which he must have been doing pretty cunningly because, when I went round to see him, he and his missus and kids lived in a broken-down rural Cape with the children's pet turtles in the house's only bathtub. As money laundering goes, he was more efficient than that Soviet spy arrested in Washington around the same time, whose fancy house and cars way beyond his means had failed to attract the suspicion of his colleagues.

Anyway, the case against the lawyer fell apart, though they stuck him with one count of mail fraud and pretty much destroyed his life. And since then I've been a consistent opponent of the "war on drugs" because, as I wrote the other day and as I've written before in The American Spectator and elsewhere, it corrodes the integrity of the justice system, and it's foolish to think that that that corrosion can be confined only to one corner of the law. As Conrad & co are now discovering. (Incidentally, even by the most generous definition, three of the four men convicted in Chicago are nobody's idea of "bloated children of privilige".)

Here's just a random half-dozen reforms the US justice system would benefit from:

1) An end to the near universal reliance on plea bargains, a feature unknown to most other countries in the Common Law tradition. This assures that a convicted man is doubly penalized, first for the crime and second for insisting on his right to trial by jury. The principal casualty of this plea-coppers' parade is justice itself: for when two men commit the same act but the first is jailed for the rest of his life and dies in prison while the second does six months of golf therapy and community theatre on a British Columbia farm and then resumes his business career, the one thing that can be said with certainty is that such an outcome is unjust.

2) An end to the reliance on technical charges such as "mail fraud" and "wire fraud", whereby you're convicted not for the crime itself but for sending a letter or authorizing a bank transfer in the course of said crime. This gives a peculiar dynamic to the presentation of the evidence: the jury spends months hearing about vast schemes and elaborate conspiracies but in the end is asked to rule only on one narrow UPS delivery or faxed letter, the sending of which is not in dispute, only the characterization thereof. If the non-competes are fraudulent, prosecute the fraud, not the mailing of a memo to Jim Thompson while he's on vacation at Claridge's in London.

3) An end to the process advantages American prosecutors have accumulated over the years - such as the ability to seize a defendant's funds and assets and deprive him of the means to hire good lawyers and rebut the charges. Or to take another example: Unlike the Crown in Commonwealth countries, in closing arguments to the jury the US government gets to go first and - after a response from the defence - last. This is an offence against the presumptions of English law: The prosecutor makes his accusation, the accused answers them. Every civilized legal system allows the defendant the last word.

4) An end to countless counts. In this case, Conrad Black was charged originally with 14 crimes. That tends, through sheer weight of numbers, to favour a conviction on some counts and acquittal on others as being a kind of "moderate" "considered" "judicious" "compromise" that reasonable persons can all agree on. In other words, piling up the counts hands a huge advantage to the government. In this case, one of the 14 counts was dropped halfway through the trial, and another nine the jury acquitted Conrad on. But the four of the original 14 on which he was convicted are enough. One alone would be sufficient to ruin his life. This is the very definition of prosecutorial excess. Why not bring 20 charges or 30 or 45? After all, the odds of being acquitted of all 45 are much lower than those of being acquitted of 30 or 40.

5) An end to statute creep. One of the ugliest features of American justice is the way that laws designed to address very particular situations are allowed to metastasize and be applied to anything a prosecutor fancies. The RICO statute was supposed to be for mobsters and racketeers. Conrad Black is not a racketeer but he was nevertheless charged with racketeering. And, while the prosecutorial abuse of RICO is nothing new, the abuse of the "obstruction of justice" statutes in this case are unprecedented. Hitherto, the only obstruction charges that could be brought in regards to extra-territorial actions involved witness-tampering. In that security video at 10 Toronto Street, Conrad Black may be doing all manner of things, but he's not tampering with any witnesses. Nevertheless, a hitherto narrowly defined statute has now been massively expanded to enable prosecutors to characterize actions by foreign nationals on foreign soil in a way never contemplated by the relevant legislation. Statute creep is repugnant and should be stopped.

6) An end to de facto double jeopardy.  Conrad Black is likely to wind up back in court to go through all the stuff he's been acquitted of one mo' time, this time in a Securities and Exchange Commission case. That would be a civil case, not a criminal one, and the US Attorney insists that the SEC is an entirely separate body. Oh, come on. The US Attorney and the SEC are both agencies of the US Government. They work in synchronicity. It's not the same as Nicole Brown's family suing OJ after the state's murder case flopped. In this instance, two arms of the same organization are bringing separate cases on exactly the same matters. That's double jeopardy - or, in fact, given the zealousness of the SEC, triple and quadruple jeopardy.

Conrad Black would have benefitted from the above changes, but so would a lot of nickel'n'dime stumped-tooth losers with tattoos - which is as it should be: Justice is supposed to be blind. But this system is blind drunk on its own power.

Halfway through the trial, for example, when things were going wobbly for them, the government made a revised offer of a plea deal to Mark Kipnis, the lowly fourth defendant. Had he pleaded guilty to a very minimal charge, the prosecutors would have got the most sympathetic guy and the best-liked defence lawyers out of the room - a huge advantage to them midway through the trial. The genius of English law is the balance between judge, jury and prosecutor, all of which the US system has distorted.