Former state Treasurer Martha Shoffner made a brief appearance Thursday before a federal magistrate judge in Little Rock to formally proclaim her innocence to public-corruption charges.
On Feb. 6, a federal grand jury returned a superseding indictment that added 10 counts of mail fraud to the 14 bribery and extortion charges Shoffner had been facing since her original June 5 indictment.
Because the new charges were filed so close to Shoffner’s trial on the June charges, U.S. District Judge Leon Holmes granted her request to sever the two groups of charges so that she can proceed to trial Monday as scheduled on the first batch and will have time to prepare for a second trial on the mail-fraud charges.
On Thursday, after defense attorney Charles “Chuck” Banks of Little Rock announced Shoffner’s plea of innocent on all charges, U.S. Magistrate Judge Beth Deere set a tentative trial date of March 31 on the mail-fraud charges. However, Banks said after the hearing that he intends to file a motion to postpone the second trial to allow him enough time to prepare.
Shoffner, 69, didn’t address the judge at the hearing, which lasted only a couple of minutes, and declined afterward to make a statement to reporters.
Later in the day, Holmes issued an order denying a Feb. 21 defense motion to dismiss the bribery and extortion charges on the grounds that they don’t belong in federal court.
He rejected a defense attorney’s argument that the charges didn’t properly demonstrate a link to “interstate commerce,” saying the case is properly under federal jurisdiction because a grand jury charged Shoffner with violating federal laws. He also said the allegations in the indictment are specific enough to allow Shoffner to challenge them.
The judge dismissed a second argument as well, that the bribery charges were faulty because they didn’t identify a federal program from which the funds were obtained. He said the motion didn’t cite case law to support that contention.
The trial that begins Monday is scheduled to start at 9:15 a.m. with jury selection and is expected to last one to two weeks.
A panel of 12 jurors and alternates will be seated after the judge and attorneys narrow a pool of potential jurors from an 11-county area constituting the Western Division of the Eastern Division of Arkansas. The division includes Pulaski, Saline, Lonoke, Prairie, White, Faulkner, Perry, Conway, Van Buren, Pope and Yell counties, but doesn’t include Jackson County, where Shoffner lives in Newport.
Prosecutors say Shoffner’s desire to keep an apartment in Little Rock to avoid frequent commutes between Newport and her Little Rock office was part of the driving force behind the extortion and bribery charges. She is accused of accepting $36,000 in cash payments between mid-2010 and May 18 to cover the cost of an apartment she started renting in Little Rock after a house she lived in rent-free was sold.
The indictment accuses Shoffner of accepting the cash from an unnamed bond broker in return for steering him the lion’s share of the state’s lucrative bond business. She is charged with six counts of extortion, one count of attempted extortion and seven counts of accepting a bribe as an agent of state government.
The mail-fraud charges accuse Shoffner of a different kind of public corruption - in this case, involving campaign funds. They allege that she obtained contributions for her re-election under the false pretense that all the funds would be used for campaign expenses in accordance with state law, but instead she purportedly used $9,800 of the campaign funds to pay off personal credit-card charges for items including clothing and cosmetics.
Shoffner is being represented by Banks and Grant Ballard of the Banks Law Firm. The government is being represented by Assistant U.S. Attorney Jana Harris.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 02/28/2014