Appeals court upholds ex-coal boss’s conviction

A federal appeals court Thursday upheld the conviction of former coal mining boss Don Blankenship for charges related to a 2010 mine explosion that killed 29.

The three-judge panel of the Richmond, Va.-based Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit wrote that it found no “reversible error” on the part of the lower court.

Blankenship was the chief executive officer of Massey Energy Corp. when a 2010 explosion in its Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia killed 29 workers.

{mosads}A district court in 2015 convicted Blankenship of conspiring to willfully violate federal mine safety laws in the lead-up to the explosion. The court sentenced him to a year in federal prison and a $250,000 fine.

His appeal to the circuit court rested mostly on his contention that the lower court incorrectly instructed the jury that “willfully” violating safety rules can include behavior that is merely “reckless.”

That interpretation is not legal, Blankenship’s attorneys argued.

But the appeals court judges said that Congress clearly intended “reckless” behavior to be included when it wrote the Mine Safety Act, noting that the Coal Act, which it replaced, had been interpreted that way.

“That Congress enacted the Mine Safety Act because it believed the penalties available under the Coal Act had proven insufficient to deter safety violations further evidences that Congress did not intend for courts to construe ‘willfully’ in the Mine Safety Act more strictly than they had interpreted the term in the parallel provision in the Coal Act,” the court wrote.

The circuit court also rejected Blankenship’s arguments that his indictment was incomplete, he was improperly prohibited from cross-examining a witness a second time and and the jury’s instructions lowered the government’s burden of proof too much.

Booth Goodwin, the United States attorney who prosecuted the Blankenship case, celebrated the appeals court’s ruling.

“It was a resounding affirmation of the ruling of the district court and the worthiness of the prosecution in general,” Goodwin, who has since resigned and now works in private practice, told The Hill.

Goodwin said the ruling has important national implications as well, since it endorsed the idea that individual officials in a corporation can be prosecuted for the corporation’s actions.

“We also felt it was proper — in fact, it was required — that was prosecuted every individual that should held accountable,” Goodwin said.

Blankenship is serving out his one-year prison sentence in California, where he is due to remain until May.

He says he is a “political prisoner” and publicly supported President-elect Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in last year’s election.