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WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court dealt a blow to the convictions of Enron's Jeffrey Skilling and former media mogul Conrad Black, issuing a trio of unanimous opinions that eviscerated a favorite prosecution tool against corporate and public corruption.Writing for the court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said prosecutors pushed too far in using a federal law that makes it a crime for a person to deprive others of his "honest services." Justice Ginsburg said prosecutors used it as a catch-all charge against allegedly corrupt behavior instead of sticking to the more precisely defined offenses of bribery and kickback schemes.That practice violates the Fifth Amendment guarantee that "no person shall be…deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law," the court found. Due process requires that people know clearly where the line is drawn between criminal and lawful behavior, the court has held.Mr. Skilling was alleged to have pumped up Enron Corp.'s share price by misleading the public about the company's health, even as it careered toward bankruptcy. Because his own compensation, plus his own portfolio's value, was tied to Enron's share price, Mr. Skilling deprived shareholders of "the intangible right of honest services," as the statute puts it, prosecutors alleged.Applying her logic that only clearly defined offenses such as taking kickbacks or bribes can be punished under the statute, Justice Ginsburg wrote that Mr. Skilling "did not commit honest-services fraud." She said the same in a separate case involving Lord Black. The court also ruled in favor of a former Alaska state legislator, Bruce Weyhrauch, snared in a corruption probe.
