A federal judge on Thursday granted a request filed a day earlier by federal prosecutors to dismiss all remaining charges against John Stacks, owner of the Mountain Pure Bottling Co. in Little Rock.
The one-sentence motion to dismiss didn't give a reason but asked that the indictment be dismissed "with prejudice," meaning permanently.
Stacks was scheduled for a second jury trial beginning Aug. 29 in the Little Rock courtroom of U.S. District Judge Leon Holmes.
In May, a three-judge panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis upheld Holmes' decisions to throw out two jury convictions that stemmed from Stacks' first trial in October 2014 and grant him a retrial on the other five convictions.
The two thrown-out convictions accused Stacks of making false statements in connection with applying for disaster assistance loans from the U.S. Small Business Administration after he said company equipment stored in Damascus was damaged in a 2008 tornado. Holmes said, and the 8th Circuit agreed, that the purported false statements were never proved to be false.
The other five charges on which the 2014 jury convicted Stacks, but that Holmes said the evidence at trial didn't necessarily support, entitling him to a new trial, consisted of three counts of wire fraud, one count of making a false and fraudulent claim to the SBA and one count of making a false statement to a government agency. They also were related to the loan applications.
The 2014 jury had also deadlocked on three money laundering charges that were set to be retried next month, along with the five charges for which Holmes had granted a new trial.
Prosecutors had the option of retrying the case or dropping it, and had been pursuing a retrial until filing the motion to drop the case on Wednesday.
Prosecutors declined to comment on their reasons for dropping the case.
Metro on 07/22/2016