Second, the Government asserts that the defendants aimed to deprive the Port Authority of the costs of compensating the traffic engineers and back-up toll collectors. For different reasons, neither of these theories can sustain the verdicts. Baroni’s and Kelly’s realignment of the access lanes was an exercise of regulatory power—a reallocation of the lanes between different groups of drivers. This Court has already held that a scheme to alter such a regulatory choice is not one to take the government’s property. Id., at 23. And while a government’s right to its employees’ time and labor is a property interest, the prosecution must also show that it is an “object of the fraud.” Pasquantino v. United States, 544 U. S. 349, 355. Here, the time and labor of the Port Authority employees were just the implementation costs of the defendants’ scheme to reallocate the Bridge’s lanes—an incidental (even if foreseen) byproduct of their regulatory object. Neither defendant sought to obtain the services that the employees provided.
This decision overturned the holdings of the federal trial court and third circuit court of appeals. The main defendant, Kelly, had her sentencing stayed. Therefore, she avoided serving any time in prison. Her co-defendant did not obtain a stay until he had already served several months in a federal prison.