As discussed here, in February Charles Hunter Hobson (who served in a variety of roles at Corsa Coal from 2013 to 2018) was found guilty by a jury for various Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and related offenses in connection with an Egyptian bribery scheme. As highlighted here, the “foreign official” jury instruction in the Hobson case was flawed and Hobson’s motion for acquittal (filed on April 6th) on a variety of issues remains outstanding.
Recently, Hobson switched counsel and is now represented by R. McConnell Group attorneys Ryan McConnell, Matthew Boyden, and Larry Finder. This same group of attorneys recently represented FCPA defendant Ramon Alexandro Rovirosa Martinez. As highlighted in this recent post, in April, Judge Kenneth Hoyt (S.D. Texas) granted post-trial motions to dismiss and acquittal by Ramon Alexandro Rovirosa Martinez and ordered that he be released from prison.
In a new filing (seeking leave to file a reply in support of his pending motion for a judgment of acquittal), new counsel cites a June Supreme Court decision – Hunter v. U.S. – and how it “bears directly on how this case was litigated.”
The filing states:
“After the verdict in this case, a few weeks ago, the Supreme Court decided Hunter v. United States —a decision that bears directly on how this case was litigated. Hunter holds that contractual agreements waiving defendant’s constitutional rights are not enforceable, even if knowing and voluntary, where enforcement of the agreement would result in a miscarriage of justice. The Court grounded that rule in the judiciary’s own stake in the proceedings: the enforcement of waivers “implicates the interests not only of the agreement’s parties, but also of the judiciary,” because some rules are “so fundamental” that they cannot be waived “without irreparably discrediting the federal courts.” Id. (quoting United States v. Mezzanatto, 513 U.S. 196, 204 (1995)). “Whatever the parties have agreed to, the court’s own responsibility is apparent, and so automatic enforcement may ‘risk[] institutional harm.’” (quoting Mezzanatto, 513 U.S. at 205). The “[f]ederal courts,” the Court reasoned, “have an ‘independent’ ‘institutional interest’ in ensuring that legal proceedings ‘appear fair to all who observe them.’” (quoting Wheat v. United States, 486 U.S. 153, 160 (1988)). Hunter was decided 8–1.
Mr. Hobson was tried under a broadly written proffer agreement that the government read to reach not merely any inconsistent testimony he might give, but his witnesses and his counsel’s cross-examination and argument. Confronted with that reading, prior counsel put on no case and, at the close of the evidence, declined even to make an oral motion for a judgment of acquittal, citing a “proffer problem, argument problem,” reserving the challenge for the written motion now pending.
The sufficiency of the government’s proof—the question Rule 29 exists to test—was thus neither developed at trial nor, in the shadow of the same waiver, fully pressed afterward. Hunter now calls into question the enforceability and the scope of the waiver that produced that silence, and it supplies good cause to permit the reply Mr. Hobson now seeks leave to file.”
