Cruel and unusual punishment for Black?
In the interest of full disclosure, it must be said that your correspondent not only knows Conrad Black but - dare we say it? - actually likes the guy to boot.

It continues to amaze, given the number of jobs Black personally created over the years for Canadian journalists, that so many of those journalists are not even attempting to contain their glee at the apparent downfall of this one-time media giant.

But there you have it. Some people simply hate successful people. Others are put off by his lavish lifestyle and his public arrogance. If you know black personally, that arrogance doesn't come across when you're with him. But there's no doubt that when cameras and/or tape recorders are trained on him, he can't seem to help himself.

That having been said, there is no escaping the fact that Black has been convicted of four criminal charges in a Chicago courtroom - that may change on appeal, but he's not likely to get all the convictions tossed out - and therefore his numerous enemies both within the media and outside the media can call him a thief and a criminal and whatever other epitaphs they chose without fearing that they would be subject to Black's legendary litigious response.

That's fair enough, one supposes.

What clearly isn't fair, however, is all this talk - some of it from the overly-politicized U.S. prosecutors - that Black deserves to spend the next 30 years in jail without parole.

Please. He didn't kill anybody. And even if you accept the worst of the criminal charges against him, what he did was take money which should have been shared by other wealthy colleagues and put it in his own pocket and those of his few closest business partners.

This is no way excuses Black for the crimes he has been convicted of, but it 's completely absurd to rank his crimes on par with say, the former Enron bosses, who set up phony companies and bilked billions of dollars from average working men and women who had invested in good faith. Many of these victims, unlike in the Black case, lost their life's savings.

All of Black's "victims" - such as they are - remain richer. They would have been just a bit richer had Black and friends shared the wealth, but they're hardly suffering. So let's not make these silly comparisons with Enron and other major corporate crimes.

Pending a different outcome from his appeals, as things stand, Black does indeed deserve to do some time, just as Martha Stewart did for her relatively minor fiscal indiscretions. A couple of years perhaps. But 30 years? Come on! He wouldn't get that if he'd murdered somebody. He is, despite the understandable hype over his trial, a non-violent first-time offender.

But quite apart from Black's convictions for his criminal acts, the former press baron - and brilliant author - also stands accused by many of his media enemies of another horrible crime, i.e., that he espoused views that were "not Canadian."

Two prominent writers - Lawrence Martin in The Globe and Mail and Linda McQuaig in the Toronto Star - were among others who used the occasion of Black's conviction to find him guilty of espousing an ideology, i.e. conservatism, which they clearly find offensive and extremely un- Canadian.

Think I'm kidding? Here's what Martin wrote of Black.

"He stood apart from the Canadian mainstream, not only because of his wealth, lifestyle and power, but because he was an arch-conservative in a land where that breed is uncommon ... His views were an ill fit ... We hardly viewed him as one of our own. He was cut from a different cloth."

You will know, of course, that these views reflect the extraordinarily arrogance of the currently deposed Liberal Party of Canada, a party which sees itself as this country's "natural governing party," and which ran the last election (and several previous ones) on the basis that the Conservative Party did not believe in "Canadian values," another way of saying Liberal policies.

On that score, of course, Black is certainly guilty. Me too, along with the millions of Canadians who voted Conservative in the last election, more, lest we forget, than voted for the self-proclaimed "Canadian" Liberals.

It is true that Black disowned his Canadian citizenship in order to accept his British peerage, but he was forced into that by the petty-minded Jean Chretien, who, as prime minister at the time, decreed that a Canadian citizen could not become a British Lord without giving up his citizenship, a rule which had not been applied to many previous Canadian press barons, Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Thomson among them.

Celebrate if you must at the demise of an impressive businessman and biographer, but it says here that just because Black was by any measure larger than life, he still doesn't deserve cruel and unusual punishment because of it.