Supreme Court declines to review Ravenell’s appeal

The Supreme Court has declined to take up former Baltimore attorney Kenneth Ravenell’s appeal of his years-old money laundering conviction.

A federal jury in December 2021 found Ravenell, once regarded among the city’s most prominent criminal defense lawyers, guilty of conspiring to launder the proceeds of one of his client’s drug organizations. The following year, a judge sentenced him to almost five years in prison followed by three years of supervised release.

Ravenell was able to delay reporting for federal custody by raising various legal arguments on appeal.

His latest centered on the contention prosecutors presented evidence against him at trial that broached the criminal statute of limitations. Through his attorneys, Ravenell argued that the judge failed to charge the jury with deciding whether prosecutors violated the law in that respect, preventing him from getting a fair trial.

Last summer, a threejudge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit rejected the argument in a split-ruling. Ravenell seized on the dissenting judge’s vote for a new trial in an application to present the argument to the entire appeals bench, but the court declined to take it up, with the judges voting 9-5.

Ravenell next filed a request, known as a petition for a writ of certiorari, asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear his appeal. His petition drew support from the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the Maryland Criminal Defense Attorneys’ Association,

which urged the nation’s high court to take his case.

Objecting to Ravenell’s request, the U.S. Department of Justice asked the Supreme Court to let the lower courts’ rulings stand.

The Supreme Court declined to take the case Monday.

A spokesperson for Ravenell’s legal team did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

His attorneys filed a status report Monday in the money laundering case, asking the judge to allow Ravenell to report to a minimum security federal correctional facility in Fairton, New Jersey, on May 6 or later.

They wrote that waiting until that date would enable Ravenell to keep a previously scheduled medical appointment, “as well as to order his affairs before beginning his sentence.”