The U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey is the chief federal law enforcement officer in New Jersey. On December 16, 2021, Philip R. Sellinger was sworn in as U.S. Attorney. The U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey has jurisdiction over all cases prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney.
Operation Boptrot, also referred to as Boptrot, was an investigation by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) into corruption among the Kentucky General Assembly, the Commonwealth's legislature. The operation was highly successful, with the investigation culminating in several indictments in 1992, leading to the conviction of more than a dozen legislators between 1992 and 1995. The investigation also led to reform legislation being passed in 1993.
Dennis Jacobs is a Senior United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
William Frank Boyland Jr. is an American convicted felon and former politician from the state of New York. A Democrat, Boyland represented District 55 (Brooklyn) in the New York State Assembly and was first elected in a 2003 special election. He forfeited his Assembly seat on March 6, 2014 due to his conviction on federal felony charges related to extortion, bribery, and official corruption, and he was sentenced to 14 years in prison.
Honest services fraud is a crime defined in 18 U.S.C. § 1346, added by the United States Congress in 1988, which states "For the purposes of this chapter, the term scheme or artifice to defraud includes a scheme or artifice to deprive another of the intangible right of honest services."
McNally v. United States, 483 U.S. 350 (1987), was a case in which the United States Supreme Court decided that the federal statute criminalizing mail fraud applied only to the schemes and artifices defrauding victims of money or property, as opposed to those defrauding citizens of their rights to good government. The case was superseded one year later when the United States Congress amended the law to specifically include honest services fraud in the mail and wire fraud statutes.
Several statutes, mostly codified in Title 18 of the United States Code, provide for federal prosecution of public corruption in the United States. Federal prosecutions of public corruption under the Hobbs Act, the mail and wire fraud statutes, including the honest services fraud provision, the Travel Act, and the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) began in the 1970s. "Although none of these statutes was enacted in order to prosecute official corruption, each has been interpreted to provide a means to do so." The federal official bribery and gratuity statute, 18 U.S.C. § 201, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) 15 U.S.C. § 78dd, and the federal program bribery statute, 18 U.S.C. § 666 directly address public corruption.
The Federal Correctional Institution, Morgantown is a minimum-security United States federal prison for male inmates in West Virginia. It is operated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, a division of the United States Department of Justice. The facility has been nicknamed 'Club Fed' because of its amenities which include a large college-like campus, a movie theater, a bocce ball court and a basketball court as well as housing many white collar, nonviolent offenders.
Schmuck v. United States, 489 U.S. 705 (1989), is a United States Supreme Court decision on criminal law and procedure. By a 5–4 margin it upheld the mail fraud conviction of an Illinois man and resolved a conflict among the appellate circuits over which test to use to determine if a defendant was entitled to a jury instruction allowing conviction on a lesser included charge. Justice Harry Blackmun wrote for the majority; Antonin Scalia for the dissent.
Corruption in Illinois has been a problem from the earliest history of the state. Electoral fraud in Illinois pre-dates the territory's admission to the Union in 1818. Illinois had the third most federal criminal convictions for public corruption between 1976 and 2012, behind New York and California. A study published by the University of Illinois Chicago in 2022 ranked Illinois as the second most corrupt state in the nation, with 4 out of the last 11 governors serving time in prison.
John J. O'Brien is a former commissioner of the Massachusetts Probation Service. He was convicted of four counts of mail fraud, and one count of racketeering, and one count of conspiracy. The verdict was pronounced on July 24, 2014, by a 12-member federal jury of the U.S. District Court in Boston, Massachusetts. US District Court Judge William G. Young was the presiding judge. The jury deliberated for seven days and the case lasted two months.
Operation Lost Trust was the name of an FBI investigation into the South Carolina General Assembly from 1989 to 1999. By the end of the investigation, seventeen members of the South Carolina General Assembly were arrested for bribery, extortion, or drug use. Operation Lost Trust is often considered the greatest political scandal in the history of the state of South Carolina. It directly influenced the passing of South Carolina's Ethics Reform Act of 1991 and led to the restructuring of the state government in 1993. In its wake the once dominant South Carolina Democratic Party was weakened as a political party and the Republican Party emerged as a viable political entity in the state.
Kelly v. United States, 590 U.S. ___ (2020), was a United States Supreme Court case involving the 2013 Fort Lee lane closure scandal, also known as "Bridgegate". The case centered on whether Bridget Anne Kelly, the chief of staff to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie who was running for reelection at the time, and Bill Baroni, the Deputy Executive Director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, improperly used lane closures on the George Washington Bridge to create traffic jams as a means of retaliation against Mark Sokolich, the mayor of Fort Lee, New Jersey, when he refused to support Christie's reelection campaign. While lower courts had convicted Kelly and Baroni on federal fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy charges, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned the convictions in its May 2020 ruling, stating that such charges could not apply as "the scheme here did not aim to obtain money or property", and remanded their cases back to the lower courts.
Mont v. United States, No. 17-8995, 587 U.S. ___ (2019), is a United States Supreme Court case concerning the proper interpretation of "supervised release" under 18 U.S.C. §3624(e). The case involved a prisoner who was convicted on drug distribution charges and was sentenced to imprisonment and supervised release. While on supervised release, he was charged and pleaded guilty to various state-law offenses, but due to administrative delays, his sentence was not entered until after the day on which his supervised release was to end. He was nonetheless charged with violating the terms of his supervised release, and he sought to challenge the court's jurisdiction to hear the case, arguing that his pretrial detention for the later offenses. The question in the case was whether a term of supervised release for one event can be tolled (paused) by imprisonment for another offense.
