Free Speech, Due Process and Trial by Jury
Five men and a woman have pleaded guilty to conspiring to steal thousands of barrels of crude oil from Permian Basin producers and often selling it to other defendants in the conspiracy for a fraction of its value, according to U.S. Attorney Ryan Raybould for the Northern District of Texas.
Federal white-collar crime prosecutions generally have fallen both nationally and in Texas over the past three fiscal years, according to U.S. Sentencing Commission data.
A Texas Lawbook review found that for crimes ranging from antitrust to tax fraud, the numbers have steadily declined both nationally and in the four judicial districts in Texas.
Aaron Reitz, a former Trump administration official and top lawyer for the Texas attorney general, has been selected as the next U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas, according to a Bloomberg Law report published late Tuesday night.
The Texas Lawbook's Mark Smith talked to Reitz during his campaign for Texas attorney general.
Dallas attorney Laura Benitez Geisler agreed to represent former police captain Terry Bevill after hearing his story. He had been fired, arrested and charged with a felony for signing an affidavit questioning whether a coworker could receive a fair trial in Wood County, putting him at odds with powerful rural officials.
Despite losing his job, health insurance and facing legal uncertainty for 16 months, Bevill said he would act the same way again because it was his duty to uphold the Constitution.
Moved by his conviction, Geisler felt a responsibility to take his case.
QUITMAN — After a nine-year legal battle, the city of Quitman has acknowledged the hardships faced by Terry Bevill, a former police captain who was fired and later arrested for aggravated perjury after signing a 2017 affidavit stating he didn’t believe a coworker could receive a fair trial in Wood County.
A federal judge sentenced a Plano orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Michael Taba, to 8.5 years in prison for his role in one of the biggest healthcare fraud cases in Texas history that prosecutors said bilked the U.S. government out of nearly $200 million through unnecessary compound drug prescriptions.
U.S. District Judge Sam A. Lindsay handed down the sentence on Tuesday in Dallas after a jury convicted Taba more than two years ago of conspiracy to commit healthcare fraud and three counts of aiding and abetting healthcare fraud.
Katten's Brandon N. McCarthy said he was perplexed when his client, retired Dr. David Wolf of Houston, was indicted on an alleged kickback scheme that was ultimately dismissed against 10 doctors.
“This was perplexing as my client was 81 years old and had retired from medicine over half a decade ago,” McCarthy said. “He had a 50-year career as a doctor with a perfect record. No medical board issues. No criminal record. My first thought was, ‘What in the world are they doing?’"
A Texas federal judge tossed a superseding indictment accusing 10 doctors, two pharmaceutical executives and two business entities of a kickback scheme involving prescriptions that spanned six years from 2013 to 2019.
The defendants had moved to dismiss the superseding indictment on several grounds, including statute-of-limitations issues.
Rather than respond to that motion, the prosecutors moved to dismiss the case “in the interests of justice.”
A former federal prosecutor and a Dallas-based criminal defense attorney received misdemeanor probation after pleading guilty to a scheme involving deleting text messages they were ordered to produce to the court.
The majority of judges on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals have refused to consider an appeal by a man who argued that his 1992 Collin County trial was tainted because the judge and prosecutor in his case were having a secret romantic affair.
In dissent, Presiding Judge David J. Schenck wrote that the majority on the state’s highest criminal court sacrificed concerns about a fundamental breakdown in due process simply to seek finality in the long-standing appeals of a three-decade-old case.
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