In response to a defense attorney's complaint that a federal prosecutor dumped 80,000 pages of documents in his lap when he sought a little clarification about an indictment, the prosecutor stuck to her guns Monday.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Angela Jegley argued that the defense's renewed request for more details of the charges against Little Rock businessman John Stacks "is merit-less and should be denied."
Stacks, the owner of the Mountain Pure bottling company in Little Rock and two other locations, is facing wire fraud, money laundering and false-statement charges in connection with a claim he filed in 2008 for a low-interest disaster loan from the U.S. Small Business Administration. Stacks sought more than $1 million to replace equipment and other property he said he used in his Mountain Pure businesses but had stored on his farm in Damascus when a tornado struck the area on May 2, 2008.
An indictment handed up in December accuses him of falsely claiming the business losses in addition to actual damages sustained to his home and three outbuildings that were covered by insurance.
The indictment came nearly two years after federal agents executed a search warrant at the Little Rock bottling plant on Interstate 30, primarily in search of computer records to determine if the business property he claimed was damaged in the tornado was actually stored in Damascus.
After the raid but before the indictment, several employees of the plant sued the government, claiming that the agents violated their civil rights by employing "SWAT-team style" tactics in carrying out the raid, such as preventing them from leaving for several hours and seizing employees' personal property.
Last week, defense attorney Danny Crabtree of Little Rock renewed a request for a "bill of particulars," a more detailed explanation from prosecutors of how Stacks is believed to have violated the law. He noted that his earlier request was denied as moot after Jegley promised that the information would be provided in the routine process of sharing information before trial. He indicated that he was shocked when she turned over 80,000 pages of documents, arguing that it was too much to read, let alone "try to triage it to figure out what conduct the government is complaining of."
On July 18, U.S. District Judge Leon Holmes ordered Jegley to respond to the defense motion by Friday. In a response she filed Monday, Jegley noted that the judge had already deemed the indictment "legally sufficient" to allow Stacks to prepare for trial, arguing that "nothing has happened' in the interim to "call into question the sufficiency of the charging instrument."
Jegley noted that the documents she provided to the defense were delivered "in a format that is electronically search-able." She added that those documents from the Small Business Administration came with an index, as well as a "detailed chronological account of SBA's contact with Stacks from the inception of his disaster loan application in 2008 through the loan being called into default based upon his failure to comply with contractual obligations to SBA."
An attached affidavit from a federal agent indicates that those unmet obligations were primarily a failure to substantiate that the property at the heart of the damage claim had been on the Damascus farm when the tornado struck. The search warrant cited numerous attempts from the government to nail down Stacks' claims and interviews with past employees who had no knowledge of the equipment being stored in Damascus.
Jegley's response also noted that she has had conversations and email communications with another of Stacks' defense attorneys, John Everett of Fayetteville, "in which he has been advised not only of the theory of the government's case, but also on what broad categories of discovery and documents upon which the defense should focus which support the government's theory of the case."
Holmes is expected to issue a written order on the motion and the response soon.
Meanwhile, U.S. District Judge Kristine Baker has denied the government's request to throw out the civil case brought by Mountain Pure employees.
Metro on 07/22/2014