The judge presiding over former state Treasurer Martha Shoffner’s public-corruption trial next month said Wednesday that he will permit prosecutors to present evidence they say indicates she pocketed $10,000 cash from a 2009 campaign kickoff event as well as $4,000 meant to pay for a 2010 election watch party, even though she isn’t charged in either situation.
U.S. District Judge Leon Holmes also said he would allow prosecutors to present submissions they say shows she received gifts, including gift cards and a pair of glasses she wore to a legislative audit hearing, from the same bond broker who is at the heart of the 14 extortion and bribery charges she faces.
In both instances, Holmes said, the evidence that prosecutors recently notified the defense that they plan to present to bolster her criminal charges is permissible because it“provides a complete picture of Shoffner’s relationship with the broker and provides context within which the charged crimes occurred.”
The federal charges that Shoffner faces accuse her of taking $36,000 in cash from an unnamed bond broker over a period of time, in return for steering the lion’s share of the state’s bond business to him. The indictment alleges that the payments began in mid-2010 and stopped in May of last year when the broker helped the FBI carry out a sting operation leading to her arrest.
Shoffner’s attorney, Charles “Chuck” Banks of Little Rock, objected to prosecutors’ “untimely notice” about their plan to present evidence of “other bad acts,” as uncharged conduct is commonly referred to in court documents. He argued that the evidence presentation would be “unfairly prejudicial” to Shoffner, who isn’t charged with campaign finance or reporting infractions.
In weighing whether the additional presentation would be more prejudicial than “probative,” or relevant to the case, Holmes decided that it is relevant, and that its relevance outweighs any potential prejudice it would create against Shoffner.
The Arkansas Ethics Commission is responsible for investigating complaints about campaign contributions. The commission director said last year that because Shoffner is facing federal violations, he wasn’t sure a commission investigation would be the “best use of resources.”
Holmes also said Wednesday that prosecutors cannot use evidence presented in support of the extortion and bribery charges to bolster their case against Shoffner on mail fraud charges. Prosecutors added the mail-fraud charges in a superseding indictment filed earlier this month, but Holmes severed them from her original charges, saying the mail-fraud case would be tried separately at a later date.
“The crimes that will be the subject of the March 3 trial allege that Shoffner extorted and received bribes from a particular broker, whereas the crimes charged in [the added mail-fraud counts] have no apparent connection to that broker nor to any extortion or bribery,” he wrote.
Under Rule 404 (b) of the federal Rules of Evidence, Holmes said, “in a criminal case evidence of other crimes or wrongful acts may be admissible to prove motive, opportunity, intent, preparation, plan, knowledge, identity, absence of mistake, or lack of accident.” But the rule also provides that prosecutors must provide “reasonable notice of the general nature of any such evidence” they intend to present at trial.
Holmes said prosecutors indicated in a recent telephone conference that they have “planned for months” to use evidence supporting the mail-fraud charges during the extortion and bribery trial. Reiterating his earlier ruling separating the two groups of charges into two trials, on the grounds that Shoffner didn’t have time to prepare an adequate defense to the newly disclosed charges, he said Wednesday that they also couldn’t present any evidence pertaining to the mail-fraud case during the March trial.
Even though the mail-fraud allegations are to be tried separately, prosecutors sought to use the facts pertaining to that case to bolster their extortion and bribery case.
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 02/20/2014