U.S. told to break down charges for LR water bottler

A Little Rock water bottler is entitled to more specific information about the government's criminal case against him than is revealed in a federal indictment, U.S. District Judge Leon Holmes has ruled.

The ruling ends a dispute between attorneys for John Stacks, owner of the Mountain Pure bottling plant in Little Rock, and federal prosecutors, who recently responded to a defense request for more details of the accusations by handing over 80,000 pages of documents all at once.

The defense complained in a motion filed last week for a "bill of particulars" that the large amount of paperwork was impossible to navigate and argued that Stacks was entitled to know specifically what he is accused of doing wrong, so that he can prepare to defend himself at trial.

The prosecutor in the case, Assistant U.S. Attorney Angela Jegley, responded to the motion by pointing out that the information was supplied to the defense in an "electronically search-able" format, and that some of the documents came with an index. A bill of particulars isn't necessary, she maintained.

But on Tuesday, defense attorney Danny Crabtree filed a reply, asking, "What good does it do the defendant to be able to search the documents if the defendant does not know what he is searching for? If the key word 'Stacks' is searched, then tens of thousands of documents are pulled up. That is not helpful."

Later Tuesday, Holmes put the issue to rest in an order directing Jegley to produce a bill of particulars within 21 days.

Noting that Stacks contends that the indictment "does not inform him of the false statements that he allegedly made with sufficient specificity so that he can prepare for trial," the judge referred to a higher court's admonition that a defendant may, "as a matter of course," be entitled to a bill of particulars, even if the indictment is legally sufficient, in order to obtain a list of false statements he is accused of making.

Holmes said that pursuant to that directive from the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis, which oversees district courts in Arkansas and six other states, prosecutors must produce a bill of particulars for Stacks.

He also listed what, specifically, the bill of particulars must include for each of the 11 counts against Stacks.

The list requires prosecutors to "state what the defendant said or wrote that was false" in the first three counts, all of which are wire-fraud counts.

Holmes said that in a fourth count, making a false and fraudulent claim, prosecutors must "state what was misrepresented regarding the defendant's financial condition."

A fifth count -- making a false statement to the Small Business Administration -- should "identify the international third party vendor" referred to in the indictment, Holmes said.

A sixth count charges Stacks with making a false statement by causing a document to be sent to the agency that reportedly contained false revenue and revenue projections for a plant he owns in Texas. Holmes said prosecutors must "state the date of the email, the identity of the sender of the email, and how and to what extent the 2008 revenues and 2009 revenue projections were false."

For count seven, which accuses Stacks of making a false statement on a loan agreement, Holmes said, "State the date on which the defendant allegedly made the representation that his financial condition had not changed and what changes rendered that statement false."

Count eight, another charge of making a false statement on a loan agreement, should "specify how the application was untrue, incorrect, or incomplete," Holmes directed.

Finally, he said that for the last three charges -- counts nine, 10 and 11, each of which accuse Stacks of money laundering -- prosecutors must "identify the person whom the defendant caused to engage in the monetary transaction."

Stacks is scheduled for a jury trial beginning Sept. 14 on the criminal charges. Meanwhile, a civil-rights lawsuit filed by employees of the Little Rock bottling plant against federal agents who executed a search warrant on the premises in 2012 is pending before U.S. District Judge Kristine Baker.

Metro on 07/24/2014

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