Key Points

  • The Ninth Circuit amended its August 3, 2026 opinion and denied Mark Ridley-Thomas's combined petition for panel rehearing and rehearing en banc; no judge requested an en banc vote.
  • The panel held that USC's service of funneling $100,000 from Ridley-Thomas to United Ways for his son's benefit was a thing of value under both 18 U.S.C. § 1346 and 18 U.S.C. § 666(a)(1)(B).
  • Honest services fraud requires neither personal enrichment of the official nor a personal benefit to each participant, and the evidence was sufficient to show materiality.
  • The panel found no instructional error on intent, gratuities, quid pro quo, or lawful ingratiation, and affirmed the conspiracy conviction.
  • The panel declined to extend Batson v. Kentucky to intersectional race-and-gender challenges and found no clear error in the rejection of race-based challenges to the strikes of two Black female prospective jurors.

A federal appeals court on Friday refused to reconsider its decision upholding the corruption convictions of former Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, leaving in place a ruling that a university dean's help in quietly moving $100,000 to his son's nonprofit was a bribe.

A Ninth Circuit panel of Judges Johnnie B. Rawlinson, Morgan B. Christen and Anthony D. Johnstone issued an amended unsigned opinion and denied his petition for rehearing by the panel and by the full court. The order said "no judge of the court has requested a vote" on full-court review.

The ruling holds that the "thing of value" at the heart of federal bribery and honest services fraud can be a service rather than money paid to an official. Here the service was routing campaign funds through the University of Southern California for the benefit of the official's son. The panel also refused to recognize a jury-selection challenge based on race and gender combined.

Ridley-Thomas, a supervisor from 2008 to 2020, was convicted of conspiracy, federal program bribery and five counts of honest services mail and wire fraud. Honest services fraud is a crime the Supreme Court limited to bribery and kickback schemes in its 2010 Skilling v. United States decision. Jurors rejected every government theory but one: that Marilyn Flynn, then dean of USC's School of Social Work, arranged the $100,000 transfer in exchange for his vote on a county "telehealth" mental health contract. They acquitted him on counts tied to his son Sebastian's admission, scholarship and professorship at USC.

Sebastian Ridley-Thomas resigned from the state Assembly in December 2017 while facing two non-public sexual harassment complaints. His father had given $100,000 from his campaign committee to a nonprofit where Sebastian hoped to work, but it returned the money after its chief executive raised concerns about nepotism. Sebastian then started his own nonprofit, with California United Ways as its fiscal sponsor.

In April 2018, after meeting Ridley-Thomas, Flynn told a colleague that USC would get the telehealth contract and that she "had to do a little favor to get it." On May 2, Ridley-Thomas gave $100,000 to her school, and the next day he emailed Flynn that "[a]t this point it is necessary to act with dispatch." A week after USC received his check, the university sent $100,000 to United Ways. He voted for the amended contract on July 31, 2018.

On appeal, Ridley-Thomas argued that USC's role was worth nothing because he broke no campaign finance laws and could have made the donation himself. The arrangement was "admittedly not the usual bribery scheme involving the transfer of money to a public official," the panel wrote, but it met the circuit's test, which counts the value a defendant personally attaches to what he receives. Pointing to the returned first donation, the court wrote that "the Government's evidence showed that Ridley-Thomas needed a third-party intermediary to effectuate the transfer. Flynn supplied that service."

Ridley-Thomas also argued that a "perceived reputational benefit" cannot be a thing of value under Skilling. That argument "misstates the Government's theory," the court wrote, because the indictment named the transfer itself as one of the bribes. The panel added that the money did not have to enrich him personally, citing its 2011 holding that "private gain is not an element of honest services fraud." Flynn's help, the panel wrote, was "an impermissible string attached to Ridley-Thomas's support of the Telehealth amendment."

The court also found enough evidence that the concealment mattered. "At a minimum, a rational trier of fact could have determined that had the other County Supervisors been aware of the scheme, one or more of them would have changed their vote," the panel wrote.

The federal program bribery count stood as well. That law requires a bribe tied to government business worth $5,000 or more, and the telehealth amendment kept the contract's funding at $530,323.

The panel rejected all four of his challenges to the jury instructions. One relied on Snyder v. United States, a 2024 Supreme Court decision holding that the federal program bribery law "is a bribery statute and not a gratuities statute." The panel found any flaw in that instruction harmless because the honest services verdicts required jurors to find a quid pro quo, an exchange of something of value for official action. In rejecting a separate challenge to the gratuities instruction, the panel wrote that "no credible evidence was presented that the transfer of funds was intended as a gratuity."

Ridley-Thomas also argued that prosecutors violated Batson v. Kentucky, a 1986 Supreme Court decision, when they struck the only two Black women in the jury pool. He argued that race and gender together drove the strikes. The panel noted that "neither the Supreme Court nor this court has recognized a Batson claim based on intersectional considerations, a point that Ridley-Thomas concedes," and concluded: "we decline to extend Batson to intersectional challenges."

Treating the claims as race-based, the panel upheld U.S. District Judge Dale S. Fischer of the Central District of California. Fischer had found no initial showing of discrimination as to the first juror and race-neutral reasons for striking the second, and the panel held that neither finding was clearly erroneous.

Friday's order made two changes to the opinion first filed Aug. 3. It replaced "constitutes an" with "qualifies as" in one passage and rewrote the end of the jury-selection discussion to state the trial court's finding on each juror.

Flynn pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years' probation and a $150,000 fine, the opinion notes.

Alyssa D. Bell of Cohen Williams LLP argued for Ridley-Thomas. Assistant U.S. Attorney Lindsey G. Dotson argued for the government. Nadia A. Sarkis of Miller Barondess LLP represented a group of former California officials as friends of the court.

The rehearing denial leaves the affirmance of all seven convictions in place.