One of the highest-profile political corruption cases in years will soon be on its way to the Supreme Court. Lawyers for former Virginia Governor Robert F. McDonnell told a federal appeals court on Thursday that they will be taking his corruption case on to Washington and want him to be allowed to stay out of prison until the Justices act. He has been free under an earlier court order after a federal jury in Richmond found him guilty of eleven criminal fraud counts, and the trial judge sentenced him to two years in prison.
In the new filing in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, McDonnell’s legal team said it would ask the Court to review two questions of major importance in cases bringing public corruption charges: what kind of official action must follow a request to an officeholder for a favor, and whether the trial judge in this case failed to ask potential jurors if they had made up their minds about guilt based on the massive publicity that surrounded the case before the trial.