CONRAD BLACK is not quite a free man. But today the British peer is expected to take a big step in that direction following a scheduled bail bond hearing that will determine the conditions of his release from a Florida penitentiary pending an appeal against his conviction on fraud and obstruction charges.

While Lord Black and his family and friends will no doubt celebrate the occasion, images of the former publishing magnate strolling out of prison will serve as a reminder to prosecutors across the country of the devastating Supreme Court ruling that has wreaked havoc on the criminal justice system and threatened to imperil some of the biggest white-collar crime cases in recent years.

A June ruling by the Supreme Court invalidated prosecutors’ use of a criminal statute known as the honest services law, which had essentially allowed them to prosecute individuals for not living up to the duties of their office.

The court ruled that the statute should only be narrowly applied to obvious cases of bribery or kickbacks and was wrongly used in the cases against Lord Black and another high-profile corporate defendant, Jeffrey Skilling, chief executive of Enron.

Ron Safer, a Chicago attorney who defended one of Lord Black’s former colleagues, said the decision to grant bail was a “very good” indication that the appeal court was leaning toward dropping the honest services charges.

Lord Black was also convicted of a single count of obstruction of justice in that 2007 trial, however. While his attorneys are likely to argue that the honest services case “infected” his conviction on obstruction, Mr Safer said that would be a “tough argument”, although the judge in the case could shorten his sentence.

Questions of what is left of the personal fortune, if anything at all, of a media magnate who once controlled a newspaper empire stretching from Vancouver to Jerusalem, will likely come up in today’s hearing.

How the former owner of the Daily Telegraph plans to pay for bail to be set by Florida Judge Amy St Eve, who sent Lord Black to prison, will be a matter for the court to discuss, Miguel Estrada, Lord Black’s attorney, told the Financial Times this week. At his peak, Mr Black’s net worth was estimated to be $400 million (€310m).

Leading up to his conviction, the US attorneys’ office in Chicago and private investigators hired by his companies failed to pin down precisely how much Lord Black owned, according to a 2007 report in Macleans, a national weekly affairs magazine in Canada, where Barbara Amiel, Lord Black’s wife, is a columnist.

There is the 26-carat diamond worth $2.6m owned by Lady Black, who stood by him during the trial. He also owns a home in Palm Beach, Florida, worth up to $34m, where his wife resides, and another in Toronto, which was reportedly leveraged “to the hilt”, according to Macleans.

He sold his London townhouse in Kensington for $25m and a New York luxury apartment on Park Avenue for $8.5m.

Lord Black continues to face a $71m bill from the US tax authorities accusing him of evading taxes on $120m in income from 1998 to 2003. He has challenged the claim as he was not a resident or citizen of the US. Up to $118m of his legal bills were paid by the Sun Times Media Group through April 2009, as a condition of his contract with the company.

As to his future earning power, Richard Siklos, author of Shades of Black, a biography of Mr Black, suggested they were bright given his notoriety. “He will write more books and give a lot of speeches,” he said. “He’s going to be an extremely popular lecturer.”

– (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010)