A federal appeals court on Thursday denied an appeal from Shelton developer James Botti to overturn his 2010 conviction on a mail fraud charge.
In the ruling, posted at the end of this story, a three-judge panel concluded Botti’s arguments “are either moot or without merit.”
A hearing on the appeal was held last April in New York City.
Botti, formerly a prominent developer of several projects in Shelton, was convicted in March 2010 by a jury at U.S. District Court in New Haven on one count of honest services mail fraud. The jury deadlocked on other charges, including allegations that he bribed Mayor Mark Lauretti in return for the mayor’s support of his projects. A federal judge later dismissed the other charges.
He has a projected release date of Feb. 19, 2016, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Botti’s lawyer, George W. Ganim Jr., of Bridgeport, filed court documents last August in the appeal, in which he argued that a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision handed down after Botti’s conviction was enough to call for a new trial.
Botti’s lawyer argued that the instructions given by U.S. District Court Judge Charles Haight, Jr. to a jury in Botti’s case “clearly failed to limit the jury’s consideration to bribery or kickbacks in order to convict the Appellant of Honest Services Mail Fraud.”
Since the Supreme Court’s ruling narrowed the scope of the law governing Honest Services Mail Fraud, Ganim argued, Botti should get a new trial.
The panel of judges at the United States Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, based in New York, ruled that “while the jury instruction was error, it does not merit reversal because bribery was the only theory of honest services mail fraud available to the jury based on the arguments and evidence at trial.”
The FBI has been probing corruption allegations for years.
Click here to read stories about the Botti cases.
Click here to read more about alleged corruption in Shelton.
The federal probe has resulted in the conviction of Botti, his father, Peter Botti, former Shelton building inspector Elliot Wilson, and noted Shelton developer Robert Scinto.
Federal prosecutors have accused Shelton Mayor Mark Lauretti of unethical practices, but the mayor has consistently denied the accusations and has never been charged with a crime.
