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In a decision on Thursday, May 11, the US Supreme Court unanimously ruled to reverse the fraud conviction of Joseph Percoco, of the hamlet of South Salem in the town of Lewisboro, who was sent to federal prison on corruption charges in 2018.
Percoco, age 54, had been accused of accepting over $300,000 in bribes from an energy company in 2014 while he had been taking an eight-month hiatus from serving as Cuomo's Executive Deputy Secretary to manage his reelection campaign.
The bribes that he had accepted were to benefit Competitive Power Ventures, an energy company that sought to build a power plant in the Hudson Valley.
In 2018, he was found guilty of two counts of conspiracy to commit honest services wire fraud and was sentenced to serve six years in prison.
However, the Supreme Court threw out Percoco's conviction on the wire fraud conspiracy count.
In the Supreme Court's opinion, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that Percoco had been convicted based on instructions given to the jury to decide whether or not he had a "special relationship" with the government and had controlled government business when he had accepted the bribes.
However, according to Alito, these instructions were "erroneous" and "too vague" and did not properly define the "intangible right of honest services" to the government that Percoco had allegedly violated with his conduct.
In his appeal, Percoco had argued that because he had been a private citizen at the time when he was taking a hiatus from serving Cuomo, he could not be convicted of wire fraud.
Although the Supreme Court overturned his fraud conviction, the Court disagreed with this argument.
"The Court rejects the idea that a person nominally outside public employment can never have the necessary fiduciary duty to the public," the Supreme Court's opinion read.
In 2021, Percoco was transferred to a halfway house after serving time in Otisville Correctional Facility in Orange County, more than two years before his scheduled release date on April 22, 2024.
The Supreme Court's decision will now remand the case for further proceedings.
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