Snyder Case Supplemental Brief Submitted

Last week, lawyers for Dr. Mark Ridley-Thomas submitted a supplemental brief on the impact the U.S. Supreme Court’s (SCOTUS) Snyder decision has on MRT’s case now pending before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. In June, the Court clarified the meaning of the main federal bribery statute government prosecutors used to convict MRT. SCOTUS ruled that there is a distinction between a bribe and a gratuity. 

Writing for the majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh noted, “Federal and state law distinguish between two kinds of payments to public officials—bribes and gratuities.”

The Court found that “bribes are payments made or agreed to before an official act in order to influence the official with respect to that future official act. American law generally treats bribes as inherently corrupt and unlawful.” 

However, according to Kavanaugh, the treatment of gratuities by the law is more nuanced. “Gratuities are typically payments made to an official after an official act as a token of appreciation…Some gratuities can be problematic. Others are commonplace and might be innocuous. A family gives a holiday tip to the mail carrier. Parents send an end-of-year gift basket to their child’s public school teacher. A college dean gives a college sweatshirt to a city council member who comes to speak at an event….”  

Kavanaugh continued, “[G]ratuities after the official act are not the same as bribes before the official act. After all, unlike gratuities, bribes can corrupt the official act—meaning that the official takes the act for private gain, not for the public good [emphasis added]. That said, gratuities can sometimes also raise ethical and appearance concerns. For that reason, Congress, States, and local governments have long regulated gratuities to public officials.”

Kavanaugh concluded that the government was asking SCOTUS to adopt “an interpretation of [Section] §666 that would radically upend gratuities’  rules and turn §666 into a vague and unfair trap for 19 million state and local officials. We decline to do so.”

The MRT appellate team’s supplemental brief once again touches on many of the issues that are at the crux of MRT’s appeal. “Snyder held that § 666 prohibits only bribery—that is, ‘payments made or agreed to before an official act in order to influence the official with respect to that future official act’…” 

The supplemental briefing uses the SCOTUS Snyder ruling to reinforce arguments made in the opening merits brief submitted in January. According to the supplemental brief, the prosecution improperly interpreted the key statute MRT was charged with violating—the Federal bribery statute’s Section 666. Prosecutors advanced an invalid legal theory of “monetization” for actions for which there was no evidence of a quid pro quo agreement. The characterization of “reputational harm” and “nepotistic optics” as things of value that were allegedly exchanged for official acts underscored the invalidity of that theory. The brief calls out district court errors that caused prejudicial harm to MRT by failing to instruct the jury properly on these and other critical matters of the law.  

Further, the MRT appellate team argues, “The government’s repetitious claims that Ridley-Thomas “monetized” his public service also connoted corruption that the government never so much as alleged, and certainly never proved. Ridley-Thomas derived no personal enrichment from Flynn’s assistance in moving funds from his Ballot Committee to PRPI. His vote in favor of the Telehealth amendment—which allocated $547,500 to USC, not 8 million, as the government intimated—did not line his pockets either.”

In short, the supplemental brief once again takes the U.S. Attorney’s Office to task for their overreach and abuse of prosecutorial discretion. We agree with the appellate team’s supplemental brief, “For these reasons, and those stated in Ridley-Thomas’s merits briefs, the Court must reverse Ridley-Thomas’s conviction on Count 2 and, at a minimum, remand for a new trial.”

We eagerly await the government’s response to the appellate team’s arguments and interpretation of a conservative SCOTUS majority opinion in Snyder that favors MRT’s case (and a subsequent reply from MRT’s appellate team). Following this exchange of these legal briefs, we look forward to the oral arguments, which will be open to the public, some time this November or December.