OMAHA, Neb.—A federal appeals court has upheld the conviction of a Missouri man for trying to bribe a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers employee.
Russell Hoffmann was vice president of aerial mapping firm Surdex of Chesterfield, Mo., when he was found guilty in 2006 of a single count of bribery.
Federal prosecutors in Omaha had charged Hoffmann with four counts of bribery, accusing him of giving William Schwening, a former employee of the Omaha division of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, bribes worth more than $10,000 in exchange for help in winning government contracts.
Prosecutors accused Hoffmann of bribing Schwening with two golf trips, a Dell computer and software and a set of golf clubs.
Schwening also was indicted on five charges of accepting bribes.
In July 2007, a federal jury acquitted Schwening of all counts and acquitted Hoffmann of all but one count. It found Hoffmann guilty of giving Schwening several golf clubs in an attempt to get a favorable rating on a contract job.
The jury relied heavily on e-mails from Hoffmann to Schwening, one of which read, in part, “it sure would be nice to have our last contract’s evaluation in the ACASS system. Oh, by the way, how is your golf game since you got those new woods?”
ACASS is an abbreviation for Architect-Engineer Contract Administration Support System, which is a Web system that among other things contains contract performance evaluations for the corps and other agencies.
Hoffmann was sentenced to three years’ probation and ordered to pay a $5,000 fine. He appealed, arguing the court erred in its instructions to the jury and that the verdict was not supported by sufficient evidence.
During the trial, Hoffmann’s attorney had maintained that Hoffmann had given the golf clubs to Schwening “out of friendship” and to obtain good will and had asked for that wording to be used in jury instructions. However, at the request of prosecutors, the judge instructed the jury to consider whether the golf clubs had been given “solely” because of reasons of good will and friendship.
In a decision released Wednesday, two members of a three-judge panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the conviction. The third, U.S. Judge Kermit Bye, dissented, saying it’s not uncommon for long-term acquaintances to frequently talk about business and pleasure in the same conversation.
“It cannot be said, however, (that) adjacent comments about golf and an ACASS evaluation in a single e-mail dispatched 13 months after-the-fact infer guilt any more strongly than innocence,” Bye wrote.
Hoffmann did not immediately return a message left Wednesday at his Surdex office.
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