The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has overturned the 2022 convictions of former Nebraska Representative Jeff Fortenberry.
In a ruling issued Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the appellate court held that Fortenberry’s trial in Los Angeles violated his Constitutional rights.
The Ninth Circuit wrote that the trial venue was improper because Fortenberry made the statements during interviews with federal agents at his home in Lincoln, and in his lawyer’s office in Washington, D.C.
Fortenberry resigned days after he was convicted on charges that he lied to federal authorities about an illegal $30,000 contribution to his campaign from a foreign billionaire at a 2016 Los Angeles fundraiser.
The Court said the convictions were being reversed so Fortenberry could be retried, if at all, in a proper venue. In doing so, they relied on case law and a recent U.S. Supreme Court examination of the history of the Venue and Vincinage Clauses, in which that court stated “the common-law “vincinage” right… presumptively entitled defendants to a jury of the “neighborhood” where the crime was allegedly committed,” and there was “no question that the founding generation enthusiastically embraced the vincinage right…”
The Court did not take up the former congressman’s argument that the district court erred by refusing to adopt a jury instruction that “a false statement is not material merely because it causes the government to investigate the veracity, truth or falsehood of the statement itself.”
