An ongoing battle between the federal government and John Stacks, the owner of the Mountain Pure bottled water distributorship based in Little Rock, has taken another acrimonious turn.
Federal agents raided the company's bottling plant on Interstate 30 on Jan. 18, 2012, in search of documents as part of an investigation into Stacks' receipt of more than half a million dollars' worth of federal disaster-relief funds. A little more than a year later, on March 6, 2013, several Mountain Pure employees filed a civil-rights lawsuit alleging that the 40 to 50 federal agents who executed the search warrant went overboard in using "unreasonable SWAT-team style" tactics, refusing to let anyone leave the premises for several hours and seizing employees' property.
Last month, a federal judge denied the government's request to dismiss the lawsuit.
Meanwhile, an eight-count indictment was handed up in December charging Stacks with three counts of wire fraud, one count of making a false claim to the U.S. Small Business Administration, four counts of making false statements to the agency and three counts of money laundering. It accuses him of obtaining the federal funds in question by falsely claiming that company equipment in Damascus was damaged in a 2008 tornado.
On Wednesday, his attorneys expressed frustration over prosecutors' response to their efforts to obtain a "bill of particulars" -- a more detailed explanation of how Stacks is believed to have violated the law.
Attorney Danny Crabtree noted that prosecutors successfully rebuffed an earlier request by promising the judge that the information would be provided during the discovery process -- the routine pretrial disclosure of documents.
Since that time, he said, prosecutors have indeed provided the defense team with discovery -- more than 80,000 pages of documents, to be exact.
"Defense counsel is hard pressed to even read the more than 80,000 pages, much less to try to triage it to figure out what conduct the government is complaining of," Crabtree wrote.
Crabtree asked U.S. District Judge Leon Holmes, who is presiding over the government's criminal prosecution of Stacks, to order prosecutors to produce either a bill of particulars or a road map to which of the documents already provided apply to which count in the indictment.
"Without a Bill of Particulars or at least direction from the government ... as to the documents that relate to each count, the indictment fails to inform the defendant of the nature of the charge against him with sufficient precision to enable him to prepare for trial, to avoid or minimize the danger of surprise at trial, and to enable him to plead his acquittal or conviction in bar of another prosecution for the same offense when the indictment is too vague or indefinite," Crabtree argued.
In an order signed Feb. 7 denying the first request for a bill of particulars, Holmes cited Assistant U.S. Attorney Angela Jegley's contention that the indictment is "sufficient" to inform Stacks of the allegations against him. He also cited her assurance that the motion was unnecessary, because the government had agreed to provide the relevant information during the discovery process.
Holmes added that even without Jegley's promise of additional information, he considered the indictment sufficient because it includes the elements of each offense charged, the date on which each offense was purported to have been committed and enough specifics to allow Stacks to properly respond.
Jegley had also argued that Stacks' request for more details "impermissibly seeks evidentiary detail rather than clarification of the theory of the government's case."
The February order noted that the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure require the disclosure of "all of the papers, documents, data and tangible objects that the government intends to use" at trial.
Metro on 07/18/2014