On June 24, in a trio of long-anticipated decisions, the U.S. Supreme Court sharply limited one of the federal prosecutor’s favorite statutes: honest services mail and wire fraud. The rulings came in the cases of two corporate executives — former Enron Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Skilling and media mogul Conrad Black — and an Alaskan state legislator, Bruce Weyhrauch. In each case, the defendant was charged with defrauding others of their intangible right to honest services.
Honest-services fraud has been around for decades. In the 1987 McNally v. U.S. case, the Supreme Court brought prosecutions to a temporary halt by ruling that the denial of honest services was too amorphous a concept to constitute fraud. Congress responded the following year with 18 U.S.C. 1346, which specifies that fraud does include depriving another of honest services but provides no further definition or clarification.
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