F. 3d 529, affirmed in part, vacated in part, and remanded.
ФГБОУВО РОССИЙСКИЙ ГОСУДАРСТВЕННЫЙ УНИВЕРСИТЕТ ПРАВОСУДИЯ
Кафедра иностранных языков
КОНТРОЛЬНАЯ РАБОТА
По дисциплине «Иностранный язык в профессиональной деятельности» (английский)
Направление подготовки 40.04.01 «Юриспруденция»
Магистерская программа «Корпоративный юрист»
Assignment 1
Scan and translate the text
SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
SKILLING v. UNITED STATES
certiorari to the united states court of appeals for the fifth circuit
No. 08–1394. Argued March 1, 2010—Decided June 24, 2010
Founded in 1985, Enron Corporation grew from its headquarters in Houston, Texas, into the seventh highest-revenue-grossing company in America. Petitioner Jeffrey Skilling, a longtime Enron officer, was Enron’s chief executive officer from February until August 2001, when he resigned. Less than four months later, Enron crashed into bankruptcy, and its stock plummeted in value. After an investigation uncovered an elaborate conspiracy to prop up Enron’s stock prices by overstating the company’s financial well-being, the Government prosecuted dozens of Enron employees who participated in the scheme. In time, the Government worked its way up the chain of command, indicting Skilling and two other top Enron executives. These three defendants, the indictment charged, engaged in a scheme to deceive investors about Enron’s true financial performance by manipulating its publicly reported financial results and making false and misleading statements. Count 1 of the indictment charged Skilling with, inter alia, conspiracy to commit “honest-services” wire fraud, 18 U. S. C. §§371, by depriving Enron and its shareholders of the intangible right of his honest services. Skilling was also charged with over 25 substantive counts of securities fraud, wire fraud, making false representations to Enron’s auditors, and insider trading.
In November 2004, Skilling moved for a change of venue, contending that hostility toward him in Houston, coupled with extensive pretrial publicity, had poisoned potential jurors. The District Court denied the motion, concluding that pretrial publicity did not warrant a presumption that Skilling would be unable to obtain a fair trial in Houston. The court observed, media coverage, on the whole, had been objective and unemotional, and the facts of the case were neither heinous nor sensational. Moreover, the court asserted, effective voir dire would detect juror bias.
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In the months before the trial, the court asked the parties for questions it might use to screen prospective jurors. The questionnaire asked prospective jurors about their sources of news and exposure to Enron-related publicity, beliefs concerning Enron and what caused its collapse, opinions regarding the defendants and their possible guilt or innocence, and relationships to the company and to anyone affected by its demise. The court then mailed the questionnaire to 400 prospective jurors and received responses from nearly all of them. The parties agreed to exclude, in particular, every prospective juror who said that a preexisting opinion about Enron or the defendants would prevent her from being impartial.
In December 2005, three weeks before the trial date, one of Skilling’s co-defendants, Richard Causey, pleaded guilty. Skilling renewed his change-of-venue motion. The court again declined to move the trial, ruling that the questionnaires and voir dire provided safeguards adequate to ensure an impartial jury. The court also denied Skilling’s request for attorney-led voir dire on the ground that potential jurors were more forthcoming with judges than with lawyers.
Voir dire began in January 2006. Ultimately, the court qualified 38 prospective jurors, a number sufficient, allowing for peremptory challenges, to empanel 12 jurors and 4 alternates. After a 4-month trial, the jury found Skilling guilty of 19 counts, including the honest-services-fraud conspiracy charge, and not guilty of 9 insider-trading counts.
On appeal, Skilling raised two arguments relevant here. First, he contended that pretrial publicity and community prejudice prevented him from obtaining a fair trial. Second, he alleged that the jury improperly convicted him of conspiracy to commit honest-services wire fraud. The Court of Appeals rejected Skilling’s claim that his conduct did not indicate any conspiracy to commit honest-services fraud.
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Held :
1. Pretrial publicity and community prejudice did not prevent Skilling from obtaining a fair trial. He did not establish that a presumption of juror prejudice arose or that actual bias infected the jury that tried him. Pp. 11–34.
(a) The District Court did not err in denying Skilling’s requests for a venue transfer. Pp. 11–19.
(b) No actual prejudice contaminated Skilling’s jury. The Court rejects Skilling’s assertions that voir dire did not adequately detect and defuse juror prejudice and that several seated jurors were biased. Pp. 20–34.
(2) Skilling failed to show that his voir dire fell short of constitutional requirements. In any event, the District Court did not simply take venire members at their word. It questioned each juror individually to uncover concealed bias. This face-to-face opportunity to gauge demeanor and credibility, coupled with information from the questionnaires regarding jurors’ backgrounds, opinions, and news sources, gave the court a sturdy foundation to assess fitness for jury service. Pp. 22–30.
(3) Skilling’s allegation that several jurors were openly biased also fails. In reviewing such claims, the deference due to district courts is at its pinnacle: “ ‘A trial court’s findings of juror impartiality may be overturned only for manifest error.’ ” Mu’Min , 500 U. S., at 428
2. Section 1346, which proscribes fraudulent deprivations of “the intangible right of honest services,” is properly confined to cover only bribery and kickback schemes. Because Skilling’s alleged misconduct entailed no bribe or kickback, it does not fall within the Court’s confinement of §1346’s proscription. Pp. 34–51.
(a) To place Skilling’s claim that §1346 is unconstitutionally vague in context, the Court reviews the origin and subsequent application of the honest-services doctrine. Pp. 34–38.
(1) In a series of decisions beginning in the 1940s, the Courts of Appeals, one after another, interpreted the mail-fraud statute’s prohibition of “any scheme or artifice to defraud” to include deprivations not only of money or property, but also of intangible rights. See, e.g., Shushan v. United States , 117 F. 2d 110, which stimulated the development of the “honest-services” doctrine. Unlike traditional fraud, in which the victim’s loss of money or property supplied the defendant’s gain, with one the mirror image of the other, the honest-services doctrine targeted corruption that lacked similar symmetry. While the offender profited, the betrayed party suffered no deprivation of money or property; instead, a third party, who had not been deceived, provided the enrichment. Even if the scheme occasioned a money or property gain for the betrayed party, courts reasoned, actionable harm lay in the denial of that party’s right to the offender’s “honest services.” Most often these cases involved bribery of public officials, but over time, the courts increasingly recognized that the doctrine applied to a private employee who breached his allegiance to his employer, often by accepting bribes or kickbacks. By 1982, all Courts of Appeals had embraced the honest-services theory of fraud. Pp. 34–37.
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(2) In 1987, this Court halted the development of the intangible-rights doctrine in McNally v. United States , 483 U. S. 350 , which held that the mail-fraud statute was “limited in scope to the protection of property rights.” “If Congress desires to go further,” the Court stated, “it must speak more clearly.”Ibid . P. 37.
(3) Congress responded the next year by enacting §1346, which provides: “For the purposes of th[e] chapter [of the U. S. Code that prohibits, inter alia, mail fraud, §1341, and wire fraud, §1343], the term ‘scheme or artifice to defraud’ includes a scheme or artifice to deprive another of the intangible right of honest services.” Pp 37–38.
(b) Section 1346, properly confined to core cases, is not unconstitutionally vague. Pp. 38–51.
(c) Skilling did not violate §1346, as the Court interprets the statute. The Government charged Skilling with conspiring to defraud Enron’s shareholders by misrepresenting the company’s fiscal health to his own profit, but the Government never alleged that he solicited or accepted side payments from a third party in exchange for making these misrepresentations. Because the indictment alleged three objects of the conspiracy—honest-services wire fraud, money-or-property wire fraud, and securities fraud—Skilling’s conviction is flawed. See Yates v. United States , 354 U. S. 298 . This determination, however, does not necessarily require reversal of the conspiracy conviction, for errors of the Yates variety are subject to harmless-error analysis. The Court leaves the parties’ dispute about whether the error here was harmless for resolution on remand, along with the question whether reversal on the conspiracy count would touch any of Skilling’s other convictions. Pp. 49–50.
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F. 3d 529, affirmed in part, vacated in part, and remanded.
Assignment 2
Copy out the key words from the text and suggest their translation
Assignment 3
Answer the following questions:
1. What are the corporate insolvency processes?
2. Is there any difference between arbitration and mediation. Explain your position.
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