Deconstructing the conviction of Mark Ridley Thomas: Part 13 – Appearing Before the 9th & What comes Next

As we race through the last of our various 2024 holidays, and toward 2025, WitnessLA has begun to look at what effects the new year may have on the conviction of Mark-Ridley-Thomas.  In the meantime, friends and supporters of Ridley-Thomas, and others who are interested in the case, must wait for the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to hand down a decision.

As readers may remember, on November 21, 2024, the team of appellate lawyers representing MRT (as Ridley-Thomas is frequently known), argued his case before a three-judge panel at the 9th.

(Shortly after New Year’s Day, we will bring you a new story pertaining to that intriguing hearing.)

The trio of judges who heard the appeal on November 21, could come back with a decision in a few months.  Or the panel could spend as long as a year with their deliberations.

Yet, among the things that were clear from the judges’ questions during the hearing—which ran for approximately 44 minutes in Courtroom 1 of the Richard H. Chambers U.S. Court of Appeals building—was the fact that, in order to arrive at a ruling, the three judges on the panel plan to look at everything.

As it happens, everything includes several hundred pages worth of appellate briefs, including a number of amicus briefs, plus the piles of material presented during the trial, the string of pre-verdict notes from the jury, and the trial transcript, which is roughly the length of a Russian novel.

The amount of material the panel of judges needs to review is further complicated by the fact that, last month, the government didn’t just argue their theory of the righteousness of the conviction of Ridley-Thomas on seven of the 19 counts with which he was originally charged. Instead, the prosecution argued a brand new theory of the case, a theory that the jury never heard.

Here’s the deal.

As WLA readers may remember, the post-conviction phase of the case of Mark Ridley-Thomas began on January 25th of this year when the team of superstar appellate attorneys who are representing MRT, filed their 102-page brief in order to appeal their client’s conviction with the Ninth Circuit.

(You can find WitnessLA’s story detailing the defense’s first appellate brief here.)

Then in early April of 2024, the government filed its own 129-page brief in answer to the 102 pages written by the defense.

Re-litigation as a strategy

As expected, in their April answering brief, the government spent many pages on their efforts to shoot down the arguments made by the defense regarding how the prosecution got things legally wrong.  Yet, the strategy that the feds’ used to counter the points made by Ridley-Thomas’s defense team contained some unusual and unexpected features.

In order to counter the attack by the defense on Ridley-Thomas’s conviction for the charge of bribery, without which all the other charges vanish, in their April brief the government elected to reimagine the core theory of the bribery/corruption case they filed against Ridley-Thomas on October 13, 2021, which resulted in his conviction.

This means that, instead of defending case that the feds presented to the jury in March 2023, which resulted in seven guilty verdicts, in their April 2024 filing, the feds appeared to be saying to the 9th Circuit justices that would would eventually hear the appeal, “if you don’t like the theory of guilt that we used to convict the defendant, a theory that the defense has attacked as problematic, we’ve got a nice new legal theory that you might like better, even though it wasn’t the theory we presented to the jury.”

(For more on the feds post-conviction shape-changing theory of the case, see Chapter 10 of the series.)

Then, if the above was not complicated enough, on June 26, 2024, a completely unexpected element entered the legal picture when it came to Mark Ridley-Thomas’s appeal to the 9th.

This bolt-from-the-blue factor arrived courtesy of the Supreme Court of the United States.  It came in the form of one of the end-of-term decisions that the Supremes handed down in June of this year.  Notable among them was the  6 to 3 ruling in the case known as Snyder vs. The United States of America. 

It is this SCOTUS decision that could have an effect on the Ridley-Thomas appeal, along with everything else the defense and the prosecution argued to the panel of judges during the 44-minute hearing in Courtroom 1 of the Richard H. Chambers U.S. Court of Appeals building.

 (See Chapter 12 for the unexpected but intriguing details of the potential effect of the Snyder decision on MRT’s case.)

Changing of the political guard

While the 9th Circuit panel of judges takes the time needed to review the appeal of the conviction of Mark Ridley-Thomas, on January 20, 2025, Donald J. Trump will be sworn in as the President of the United States, and those whom he is in the process of choosing to run the nation with him, will also, in the near future, be sworn into their various positions. 

This changing of the guard includes, of course, a new U.S. Attorney General. Eventually, it will also likely include the replacement of 93 U.S. attorneys, one for each of the 94 federal districts (Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands are separate districts but share a US Attorney). The United States Attorney is the chief federal law enforcement officer in their district.

Martin Estrada is the U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California, which includes LA County.  He was appointed by President Joe Biden, thus will likely be on the way out at some point in the coming year.

In the meantime, Estrada has made a few rounds with the press, explaining his current priorities. During Estrada’s December 2, 2024, interview with Giselle Fernández , a respected host at Spectrum News, the priorities discussion led to topic of the case of Mark Ridley-Thomas, which appeared to be important to the U.S. Attorney. 

The matter came up when, in the course of the interview, Fernandez asked Estrada about MRT’s case in particular, while noting that Ridley-Thomas was appealing his conviction. 

“How challenging is it,” said Fernandez, “when you see a public servant like that who’s served for decades, and done a lot of good…?”

In reply to the MRT question, Estrada told Fernandez and the camera that he’d found that this was “often true in the cases we have, where an individual may have done…good things…that doesn’t mean they’re able to violate the law.  That doesn’t mean they can treat the public fisc like it’s their own personal piggy bank.”

That last sentence contained an unusual choice of words.

According to Merriam-Webster and similar sources, the term “public fisc,” is a technical term meaning the amount of money that the government or state has to spend.

The comment was surprising in that, when it came to the jury’s seven-count guilty verdict last March, Ridley-Thomas was not convicted of enriching himself or his family in any way, a fact of which U.S. Attorney Martin Estrada is aware, and a fact of which the panel of judges took time to make clear to the government’s legal team, when they attempted to introduce the unproven allegation during the 44-minute hearing on November 21, 2024, at the 9th Circuit.

Observing the exchange appeared to cause many of MRT supporters who filled the two overflow rooms of the Richard H. Chambers U.S. Court of Appeals, in Pasadena, CA, on the morning of November 21, to wonder aloud, post-hearing, why the feds brought the charges at all.

****

To be continued after we’ve entered 2025.  So….watch this space.