Former Virginia Governor's convictions affirmed

US v. McDonnell:  Despite an impressive group of amici in support of his appeal, the former governor of Virginia, Robert McDonnell, lost the appeal of convictions he received following his five-week trial.  The Fourth Circuit affirmed the judgment of the district court.

Two most important issues on appeal: 1) McDonnell argued that the district court’s jury instructions misstated fundamental principles of federal bribery law; and 2) the government’s evidence was insufficient to support his convictions pursuant to the honest-services wire fraud statute and the Hobbs Act.  The Fourth Circuit was unpersuaded by each of McDonnell’s jury instruction claims, e.g. the instructions were over-inclusive, broad, incomplete, misleading, or unprecedented. Further, McDonnell claimed one instruction was a misstatement of the law, a statement with which the Fourth Circuit disagreed, finding the instruction “indisputably correct,” and “not erroneous with respect to the Hobbs Act extortion charges."  Further, one instruction that may have been debatable to the Fourth Circuit, that the subjective beliefs of a third party in an honest-services wire fraud case cannot “convert non-official acts into official ones,” was found to be harmless, if indeed an error occurred.    The Fourth Circuit held that McDonnell failed to show that the “official act” instructions, taken as a whole, were anything less than a “fair and accurate statement of law.”

McDonnell’s claim about the sufficiency of the evidence also failed on appeal, with the Fourth Circuit finding ample “official acts” of McDonnell exploiting the power of his office in furtherance of an ongoing effort to influence state university researchers.  The Fourth Circuit found his corrupt intent was evidenced by expensive vacations, accepting loans, etc., as well as shopping sprees, cash, golf outings and vacations, all free to McDonnell and his family.  These were not goodwill gifts from one friend to another, but gifts in exchange for official acts to help a pharmaceutical company secure independent testing for its product, Anatabloc, and that McDonnell acted in the absence of good faith in receiving them.  Thus, McDonnell failed in his efforts to sustain the burden of bringing a sufficiency of the evidence challenge.