Witness LA: Deconstructing The Conviction Of Mark Ridley-Thomas: Chapter 11 – The Supremes
August 8, 2024 by Celeste Fremon
The case of Mark Ridley-Thomas is due to be heard by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in November or December of this year.
In the meantime, there is a new development that could affect the outcome of the appeal.
As readers may remember, in Chapter Nine of this series, WitnessLA outlined the basic elements of the arguments that the team of appellate lawyers representing Ridley-Thomas have described in their filings with the 9th, suggesting that the federal prosecutors who originally charged Ridley-Thomas were overzealous and got things very wrong, legally speaking.
Then in Chapter 10, we drilled down into the 129-page answering brief that the prosecution filed in April of this year in response to the arguments made by the defense in their January brief.
The most notable part of the feds’ lengthy brief was the government’s unanticipated effort to argue a brand new theory of the case.
As readers may remember, the problem with this strategy was the pesky fact that the government’s sparkling new legal theory was not contained in the original 21 charges, nor was it what the government argued in court. Most importantly, it was not a legal theory that the jury heard during the trial of MRT, as Ridley-Thomas is often known.
This means the new legal theory that the feds offered in April, did not appear to be based on the same set of alleged facts, on which the jury based its verdict.
(For more details on both these filings, take a quick look at Chapter 10.)
Now, if the above was not complicated enough, on June 26, of this year, a completely unexpected element entered the legal picture, courtesy of the Supreme Court of the United States.
SCOTUS weighs in
In late June, 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a series of end-of-term decisions, some of which caused large portions of the nation to reel. Most notable there was the questionably Constitutional ruling on presidential immunity for Donald Trump. Another controversial ruling was Chevron vs the USA, which greatly reduced the power of a long list of federal agencies.
In addition to the above rulings, there were a couple of other decisions that also stood out among the end of term opinions. Notable among them was the Supremes 6 to 3 ruling in the case known as Snyder vs. The United States of America.
It is this decision by the Supremes that could have an effect on the Ridley-Thomas appeal.
Here are some of the relevant details:
Snyder, for those unfamiliar, is a case brought by James Snyder, the former mayor of Portage, Indiana, who was charged with violating what is known as Section 666 (§666) of the federal criminal code, a statute that, among other things, bars state and local government officials from “corruptly” accepting “anything of value” with the intention of being “influenced or rewarded” for an official act.
Snyder’s actions collided with §666 in 2014, when he was still mayor, and Portage placed a $1 million order with a local Peterbilt truck dealership for a bunch of new trash trucks, which the city needed.
After the truck deal was completed, the dealership gave Mayor Snyder $13,000, which Snyder characterized as a payment for “consulting services,” and not a bribe.
When federal prosecutors learned of the fiscal sequence of events, they disagreed with Snyder’s characterization of the exchange, and charged Snyder with accepting an “illegal gratuity,” which carried, at the high end, a ten year prison term.
Snyder was convicted in federal court, and sentenced to 21 months in federal prison.
He appealed his conviction to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which declined to reverse the jury’s decision. So, Snyder took his case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
On June 26, 2024, the Supremes reversed the Seventh Circuit in a sharply divided 6-3 ruling, which broke along ideological lines, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissenting, joined by Justices Sotomayer and Kagan.
“Federal and state law distinguish between two kinds of payments to public officials—bribes and gratuities,” wrote Justice Brett Kavanaugh in the majority ruling.
“As a general matter, 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.”
Yet, the law’s treatment of gratuities is more nuanced, according to Kavanaugh and five additional justices.
“Gratuities are typically payments made to an official after an official act as a token of appreciation,” wrote Kavanaugh, “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….”
And so on.
As those examples suggest, Kavanaugh continued, “gratuities 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. 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.”
The government, concluded Kavanaugh, was asking SCOTUS to adopt “an interpretation of §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.”
And that was basically that in the majority’s opinion.
Kavanaugh had much more to say, of course, plus there is Justice Jackson’s eloquent dissent—in which she argues that questions about what Congress intended with §666, should be answered by Congress. And there are the various concurrences from both sides.
Yet, when it comes to the conviction of Mark Ridley-Thomas, the main question is whether the Snyder decision can affect his appeal to the 9th Circuit.
The appellate team makes its move
After the Snyder ruling on June 26, 2024, a couple of things happened.
First, on June 28, MRT’s lawyers filed with the 9th what is known as a “Notice of Supplemental Authority.”
In their filing, the appellate team listed the ways in which the Snyder ruling has direct bearing on the arguments raised in Ridley-Thomas’s appeal.
“In Snyder v. United States, the Supreme Court clarified the scope of the federal-programs bribery statute, and held that it prohibits bribes, but not gratuities,” wrote the appellate team’s Alyssa Bell.
MRT’s team further laid out a preview of what they will likely argue before the 9th regarding Snyder, namely that the Snyder ruling, “bears directly on several arguments raised in Mark Ridley-Thomas’s appeal,” in particular having to do with the government’s theory of the case.
Snyder, “makes clear,” appellate attorney Bell wrote, “that the government’s ‘monetization’ theory, which told jurors that receipt of a gratuity was ‘still bribery,’ was “legally invalid as to all counts.”
Things were made worse, wrote Bell, when, during the trial of Ridley-Thomas, the federal judge overseeing the trial, gave instructions to the jury that, “failed to distinguish bribes from gratuities,” despite Ridley-Thomas’s attorneys’ request for an instruction that “correctly stated the law.”
Now Snyder has further clarified the law in question, Bell wrote, dictating among other things, “that § 666 requires proof of a quid pro quo.”
Thus the fact that the district court judge refused—despite Ridley-Thomas’s team’s objection during trial—to instruct the jury on § 666’s quid pro quo requirement, was a critical problem, according to Bell.
There’s much more to the filing, which you can find here. But the bottom line is the contention by the defense that the above “errors” by the prosecution were “not harmless,” particularly post Snyder, thus, “Ridley-Thomas’s conviction must be reversed.”
The case and the conviction
For those who have forgotten the details of the charges for which Ridley-Thomas was convicted, here is a quick reminder.
In the indictment filed by federal prosecutors on Oct. 13, 2021, the government alleged that Mark Ridley-Thomas — who was, at the time in question, a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors— engaged in a bribery and corruption scheme in which he steered a series of lucrative county contracts to USC’s Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. He did so, argued the prosecution, in return for two favors supplied by Marilyn Flynn, the School of Social Work’s long-time dean, who was reportedly extremely worried about the fiscal health of the school that she had overseen since 1997.
(Dean Flynn was indicted along with Ridley-Thomas as his co-conspirator. But Flynn opted to take a plea deal, while MRT declined such a deal.)
In the March 2023 trial that resulted, the government’s prosecutors described how, in return for what the feds described as high-ticket county contracts, Dean Flynn did two major favors of her own for the well-known policymaker.
(Note: Although the government continues to claim that MRT caused the passage of several motions that resulted three or more lucrative contracts for USC’s School of Social Work, if one actually reads the motions pertaining to the first two or three “contracts,” it becomes clear the motions did not create contracts at all, but were “report back” items that produced exactly zero cash for the School of Social Work in particular—or for USC in general.
Furthermore, the third “contract,” which became the center of the government’s case, was the renewal of an already existing 2016 sole-source contract with the School of Social Work. Yet, the renewal produced absolutely zero in the form of additional cash for USC, although the renewed contract moved some small amounts of money around within the strictly limited fiscal basket that was originally created in 2016, well before any of the events portrayed by the feds in their original indictment
For more on the alleged quid-pro-quo contracts, check out Part 5 of this series.)
In any case, according to the feds, in return for these votes by Ridley-Thomas, most of which took place in summer and early fall of 2017—or earlier—Flynn performed two favors for MRT.
Her first favor was to help one of MRT’s twin sons—Sebastian Ridley-Thomas—to get a scholarship for a master’s degree in social work at USC. At the same time, the younger Ridley-Thomas applied for a part-time job as a non-tenured adjunct professor at the Dworak-Peck School of Social Work and also the Price School of Public Policy, efforts with which Flynn assisted.
Sebastian Ridley-Thomas was arguably not an illogical choice for such a position at the University of Southern California. At the time the younger Ridley-Thomas initially reached out to Dean Flynn and USC about his hope of going back to school for an advanced degree while teaching part-time, it was mid-May of 2017, and he was one of the youngest members of the California state legislature, having been elected at age 26 to represent the state’s 54th assembly district in a special election in 2013, re-elected in 2014, and again in 2016.
During the years in between, he was on prestigious legislative committees, and among his accomplishments were some youth-related bills, such as AB 1299, which improved the delivery of mental health services to youth in foster care. All of this made him a unique representative of a new generation of African American state lawmakers.
Furthermore, as is true with a long list of private universities, hiring people who are public figures of one kind or another as non-tenure track professors of some sort, or giving scholarships to people in whom the university has an interest, was not an unusual policy at USC.
(For example, it is well known that Mayor Karen Bass received a scholarship that was, as Dean Flynn memorialized in an email to her colleagues, nearly identical to that of Sebastian Ridley-Thomas.)
“You don’t have to like it,” defense attorney Daralyn Durie told the jury during closing arguments during MRT’s March 2023 trial. But, at private universities like USC, this is how things are routinely done.
Ultimately, the jury appeared to agree with the defense’s view, and declined to convict Ridley-Thomas senior of any charge related to the scholarship, et al.
Favor #2
The second of Dean Flynn’s two alleged favors was the favor that took place several months after MRT had voted for the passage of several motions that Dean Fynn hoped unrealistically would bring the School of Social Work lucrative contracts.
It was this 2nd favor, that resulted in Ridley-Thomas’s conviction.
The favor in question occurred in the spring of 2018, after the younger Ridley-Thomas had resigned from the state legislature, was attending USC, and had launched a non-profit organization in order to do polling and other research regarding Black voter trends, a project that was typical of the kind initiative supported by Mark Ridley-Thomas over the years.
The only thing that was different about this particular initiative is that the polling would be done by a new non-profit started by MRT’s son.
Like many non-profit entities, the new organization the younger Ridley-Thomas started was not itself a 501(c)(3).
Acquiring non-profit status isn’t difficult, but it takes a while. As a consequence, many would-be non-profits instead go with what is known as a “fiscal sponsor,” which umbrellas down its own non-profit status to the smaller organization, while also offering various administrative services. The sponsored organization, in turn, pays for these services with a fixed percentage of the funds the smaller entity raises.
In order to help the new non-profit get started, MRT donated $100,000 from one of his campaign funds, known as the Mark Ridley-Thomas Committee for a Better L.A. (Such a donation to nonprofits that benefited his constituents, and/or encouraged local civic involvement, was common for Ridley-Thomas. The only difference was, in this instance, one of his son’s was involved.)
In any case, the fiscal sponsor for Sebastian Ridley-Thomas’s newly formed organization was United Ways of California.
The problem with this donation, according to the prosecution, was that Ridley-Thomas made his donation using a two-step route. MRT’s Committee for a Better LA donated $100,000 to USC’s School of Social Work. Then Dean Flynn used the same $100,000 to make a donation to United Ways, with the designation that the donation was meant to be used by the non-profit that was newly under the United Ways tent.
Sebastian Ridley-Thomas was not taking a salary from the nonprofit he had formed. The funds would primarily be used to hire a former state assembly staffer who was also an adjunct faculty member at Cal State LA, with a master’s in social work. She was a good fit to do polling and research with the younger Ridley-Thomas, but if not hired in a timely fashion, would need to take another job.
The spring 2018 favor by Dean Flynn
Throughout the trial, much of the government’s bribery case was based on the feds’ contention that MRT wished to avoid reputational bad optics, a theory they expanded on at length. This theory of the case is made clear in quick perusal of the original October 13, 2021 indictment, in which the prosecution writes that Ridley-Thomas “concealed the agreement to funnel $100,000 from the Mark Ridley-Thomas Committee for a Better L.A. through the University/Social Work School to avoid any political fallout for defendant Ridley-Thomas.”
A scandal for the Ridley-Thomas family “was just not acceptable,” the government argued in closing, adding that this was because Ridley-Thomas “planned to run for mayor of Los Angeles.”
Hence the alleged value of the favor by Flynn.
(In a future chapter we’ll return to the prosecution’s supposition about a plan to run for mayor at a later date, so stick a pin in that thought.)
Next legal steps
So, now that the Snyder ruling has been added to the mix, was the help Ridley-Thomas received from Marilyn Flynn to make the two-step transfer of the $100,000 donated by Ridley-Thomas’s Committee for a Better L.A, to MRT’s son’s new non-profit, criminally corrupt as the prosecution claimed?
And what is the next step in the appeal of Ridley-Thomas’s conviction?
After the June 28 filing by the defense, things were quiet in the case for a while.
Then on July 10, 2024, the prosecution filed a motion requesting permission to file a “supplemental” brief on the meaning of the Snyder decision.
The next day (July 11), Ridley-Thomas’s team filed their own motion explaining why the believed such briefs (which tend to be lengthy) weren’t necessary.
The appellate team added that, if the court felt that post Snyder supplemental briefs were necessary, MRT’s team couldn’t file such a brief until late August because they were…well…busy.
Supplemental briefs or no supplemental briefs, the effect of the Snyder ruling on the conviction of Mark Ridley-Thomas will likely be a significant part of what both sides argue when they come before the 9th near the end of the year.
In the meantime, there are other elements pertaining to the conviction of Mark Ridley-Thomas that WitnessLA will excavate in upcoming chapters, including a deeper dive into how Ridley-Thomas came to be charged in the first place, and a look at whether or not there were people who may have believed they would personally gain if Mark Ridley-Thomas was removed from public life.
So stay tuned.