Judge DeLaughter has moved to vacate the trial setting and to schedule a status conference. The key substantive part of the motion, which is otherwise pretty routine, is about the honest services mail fraud charge:
In light of the use of the “honest services” mail fraud statute, 18 U.S.C. § 1346 as plead in this indictment, counsel anticipates the filing of several substantive pre-trial motions presenting complex issues of fact and law that may well require evidentiary hearings. These motions are expected to include, but will not necessarily be limited to, issues relating to the above mentioned statute and its use under the facts alleged in the indictment, discover, the grand jury, pre-trial publicity, and juror questionnaires. As the Court is no doubt aware, federal prosecutors’ increased use of the “honest services” mail fraud statute in the arena of local governmental affairs is becoming a nationally controversial topic and, thus, will necessarily become a significant legal issue in this case. See, e.g., Honest Services Fraud, by Prof. Laurie L. Levenson, The National Law Journal, March 8, 2009, http//www.law.com/jsp/nlj/ id=1202428828967, a copy of which is attached for the convenience of the Court.
The motion also notes that “Judge DeLaughter has been a public servant most all of his legal career and is not a man of substantial financial means.”
Here’s a copy of the motion.
Way to go Tom! glad to see you solo. should you need some axe grinding on your site I’m available.ha ha! Well it seems DeLaughter’s problems are understandable he’s a double agent of the US. Like Bond, James Bond. His employment is in a top secret state. His work on personal gain to fight terrorism will now set him free. Has any one found out hence where the money for his defense comes from? No not that for your eyes only crap huh? Depending on what he hangs his defense on he might just walk. Another action of the family and friends network.
Test
Tom, good luck! I have a question for you and an observation. What do the feds obtain with Dickie Scruggs’ guilty plea on the DeLaughter case? What does Scruggs REALLY have? From the public record, I see nothing that Scruggs contributes to the case. Scruggs appears to be a chattering convict who wanted to be moved to more familiar and comfortable surroundings.
I can’t answer other than surmise, natd4. To go to the painfully obvious, they got a guilty plea. I’m not sure the public record provides a clue as to where they are going with this.
What I can’t guess is whether there really are hidden parts to this investigation, and what they are. Bob Norman said he got leads from Scruggs already at the time of his second plea.
What is making it so hard to guess what might not yet be visible is that the prosecutors are obviously firing rifle shots at very narrow targets– none of these indictments involve “shotgun” approaches or attacks on overarching conspiracies. They involve the corruption in one particular case through one particular scheme. It’s hard to guess what the next target might be, except that the 404(b) proof of “other crimes” in Scruggs I made it absolutely clear they were focused on DeLaughter and the Wilson case.
One thing that is obvious is that the steps over the last 14 or so months have all essentially been the playing out of the consequences of facts that were already known to the public– there have not really been many new developments other than public confirmations of what we’d already seen in the newspapers or court documents. For instance, the DeLaughter case erupted in December with stories from Jerry Mitchell on the Clarion Ledger site, and the other cases involving DeLaughter (Eaton and Kirk v. Pope were known to be issues by sometime in January.
I think the main thing I learned last Fall were details about the government’s motion for the Langston sentencing, which had a couple of cases (e.g. the Captain Dees case, the forex trading firm in Florida) that had not been mentioned.