Latest on Blagojevich: Lawyer vows appeal to Supreme Court

The reversed counts were tied to Blagojevich’s effort to swap President Barack Obama’s former Senate seat for a Cabinet position in the president’s administration back in 2008.

Blagojevich will now appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, his lawyer and his wife, Patti, said in a joint statement. The Supreme Court tends to accept cases that raise weighty issues and ones that federal courts disagree on.

The Illinois Democrat’s attorney, Leonard Goodman, said in a statement Wednesday that he’s disappointed the full 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declined to rehear the case. “What’s clear is that in order for us to see justice, the appeal needs to be taken out of Illinois and be in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court where we can find fairness and impartial justice”.

The court refused the petition in a very, very three-sentence pick still the many judiciary toward the three-judge sheet had identified as to refuse a rehearing.

“The bottom line is, there really wasn’t anything else for the 7th Circuit to decide”, said Jeffrey Cramer, a former federal prosecutor who heads the Kroll security company in Chicago.

“I think the judge might feel that some adjustment was appropriate, given the appellate ruling, but the appellate ruling also went out of its way to say that they felt that the original sentence was more than justified by the convictions that were upheld”, Cotter said. “They’re well respected”, Turner said.

Specifically, the judges rejected Blagojevich’s argument that he should not have been convicted of a crime because none of the charges alleged an explicit quid pro quo exchange of one thing for another.

But Goodman argued two weeks ago that a “question of exceptional importance” exists because the three-judge panel lowered the standard of proof to put politicians in jail.

They found Blagojevich crossed that line when he sought money – often campaign cash – for naming someone to Obama’s old Senate seat. “He’d basically be asking them to overturn a jury’s verdict, and the Supreme Court isn’t interested in that”. Secretly trading favors based on politicians’ executive powers is legal and is a legitimate mechanism for getting things done for constituents, they concluded. But it called the evidence on the 13 remaining counts “overwhelming”. Blagojevich is in a federal prison serving a 14-year sentence.