Right. D*mn uppity Canadian coming down from the GWN and telling law- abiding Illini what's what. And importing a Cdn mouthpiece, too. What: Chicago's finest aren't good enough? (OK, Chicago hasn't won a Stanley Cup in more years than the Laffs, and is even less likely too. The Cubs and the White Sox? Never mind. Only the Bears are worth mentioning ... well, except for their quarterback, I'm told. But you can't Blame Canada for that.The Bears could have kept Flutie.)
Besides, This is Chicago. Think of how Elliot N ultimately got Al C. It's also a place where, at least in movies, Richard Gere can almost dance.
I thought the obstruction count had something to do with some sort of SEC order concerning the same documents. Not sure, though.
Seems like Americans like to charge people with improbable or unproveable crimes in order to achieve conviction on ancillary charges that deal with the accused's conduct after he or she has become an object of investigation.
One juror that I heard interviewed said that they had had no idea that these offences could lead to prison time of the length that does, in fact, appear possible.
I'll save my comments on Pith's surprising position on the fraud matter for some other venue. But with respect to the national issue - a common red herring among Black's apologists - I can only scratch my head at the thought that actual lawyers shrug actual shoulders at obstruction chewed, swallowed and digested...
The crimes were with respect to corporate crimes in US jurisdiction - meaning Conrad et al had voluntarily set themselves up within the American legal umbrella. Did the US send troops over the border to seize the documents? No. But they did quite lawfully require Black to provide them, a request supported by the Canadian legal regime. If one can avoid court orders for evidence by merely choosing to do their witness tampering, paper shredding or whatever by simply arranging to do it across the border, justice along the 49th parallel might be a little harder to pursue unless courts recognized the 'border-tossing' as what it is: an attempt to obstruct justice through a sort of evidentiary arbitrage. To take an extreme example, if I kill a witness in a Canadian murder trial in Mexico, it's a Mexican murder, but it remains a deliberate effort to obstruct Canadian justice, and our Yankee cousins are hardly in the wrong for saying so. To soften it a little, what if I bribe a juror, but the act of transferring the money only takes place in, say, Switzerland? :-) The juror is still bribed, the crime of obstruction is still taking place here, even if the crime of bribery and evidence of THAT crime is a cross-border problem.
Interestingly, the defence did not toss out the red herring of soveriegnty. Nor did they rush to claim that US-regulated documents should be protected from scrutiny because Contrad was rummaging through them in Canada at the time. They didn't for obvious reasons, and the matter should rest there.
I think BFK may well be right. (Once again, the course of prudence is not to second guess the process unless you invest a lot in following it.) Tampering with evidence concerning a (legitimate) federal investigation in the US is properly a US crime wherever it occurs. I should update the post.
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