After nearly a year of fighting to remain free, Conrad M. Black is going back to prison.
Mr. Black, the onetime newspaper baron, received a new jail sentence on Friday from a federal judge in Chicago for his remaining convictions on charges that he defrauded his investors. Judge Amy St. Eve imposed a three-and-a-half-year sentence on Mr. Black, although prosecutors say he will get credit for the more than two years that he has already served in federal prison.
The resentencing of Mr. Black stems from a federal appeals court decision in October that upheld two of Mr. Black’s 2007 convictions, for mail fraud and obstruction of justice, even though it reversed two other convictions for fraud. Mr. Black had been out on bail since last summer pending the appeal.
Mr. Black’s wife, Barbara Amiel Black, appeared to faint in the courtroom after the prison sentence was announced on Friday, according to news reports.
Prior to his sentencing, Mr. Black addressed Judge St. Eve for about 20 minutes but did not concede any guilt. “I never ask for mercy,” he said, according to The Associated Press, “but I do ask for avoidance of injustice.”
In his 2007 trial, Mr. Black and three other executives from his company, Hollinger International, were convicted of defrauding Hollinger shareholders out of $6.1 million. At the time, Judge St. Eve sentenced Mr. Black to six and a half years in prison.
The convictions were appealed, however, after the Supreme Court ruled last year that the broad interpretation of the “honest services” law used to prosecute Mr. Black and Jeffrey K. Skilling, the former chief executive of Enron, was unconstitutionally vague.
In their unanimous ruling on Oct. 29, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago threw out two fraud charges tied to the honest-services law. But the appeals court affirmed the two other convictions, which it concluded were not rooted in the honest-services law, and returned Mr. Black to Judge St. Eve’s courtroom for resentencing.
The date of Mr. Black’s return to prison has not yet been set.
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