Barbara Amiel - Personal Jurisprudence

Personal Jurisprudence

In August 2008, Amiel published a five-page defense of her husband first in Maclean's magazine then in The Sunday Times in which she portrayed herself as the victim of a gross injustice. "My life was wiped out in Chicago— at least all that mattered in it," she wrote. "What does it matter if one well-off elderly white woman with too many pairs of expensive shoes now finds her social life largely limited to visiting her dearly missed husband in a U.S. federal correctional institution." Amiel went on to argue that gross defects in the American judicial system matter to everyone. "If ostensibly privileged defendants like us can be baselessly smeared, wrongfully deprived, falsely accused, shamelessly persecuted, innocently convicted and grotesquely punished, it doesn't take much to figure out what happens to the vulnerable, the powerless, the working-class people whose savings have been eaten up trying to defend themselves." Conrad Black was released from Florida Penitentiary, in the United States on Friday 4 May 2012.