A U.S. District Court judge found that federal prosecutors had withheld financial data from Mr. Avenatti, the former lawyer for the pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels. He faces a retrial.
A federal judge in Southern California declared a mistrial on Tuesday in a fraud case against Michael Avenatti, giving the brash former lawyer for Stormy Daniels a rare victory as he fights his conviction and sentence in another criminal case and awaits trial in a third.
The judge, James V. Selna of the U.S. District Court in Santa Ana, Calif., found that federal prosecutors had withheld from Mr. Avenatti’s defense team financial data that they had collected as part of their case accusing him of stealing millions of dollars from five clients and lying repeatedly about his business and income.
Mr. Avenatti had contended that the accounting and tax preparation data from his law firm’s servers was exculpatory evidence that could clear him of the charges.
He asked Judge Selna in an Aug. 15 motion to dismiss the charges or grant him a new trial. The judge set a tentative new trial date for Oct. 12.
“I think today is, obviously, a good day for me personally, but it is also a good day for every individual in this country who is charged with a crime and faces the power and resources of the government,” Mr. Avenatti said in a phone interview on Tuesday. “Every American citizen deserves basic fundamental due process.”
A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles declined to comment on Tuesday, citing the continuing proceedings against Mr. Avenatti.
The website Law.com earlier reported the mistrial, which came as the testimony in the fraud case was entering its sixth week.
“I find that prejudice occurred here in a number of ways,” Judge Selna said on Tuesday, according to Law.com.
Mr. Avenatti, 50, gained widespread attention for representing Ms. Daniels, a pornographic film actress, in her lawsuits against former President Donald J. Trump.
He became ubiquitous on cable news shows and a thorn in Mr. Trump’s side. But Mr. Avenatti’s rise proved meteoric, with the government accusing him of a multitude of crimes in California and New York that could send him to prison for decades.
In July, a federal judge in Manhattan sentenced Mr. Avenatti to two and a half years in prison and three years of supervised release after he was convicted in February 2020 of trying to extort more than $20 million from Nike.
Mr. Avenatti spent several months last year in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan after a judge sided with prosecutors and ordered that he be held without bail. He was temporarily released from jail in April 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic.
During the extortion trial, prosecutors said that Mr. Avenatti had threatened to reveal how employees in Nike’s grass-roots basketball division had paid athletes to attend certain colleges unless the company hired him to conduct an internal investigation. His silence also could have been bought, prosecutors said, if Nike paid him $22.5 million to resolve the potential claims of a youth basketball coach whom Mr. Avenatti said he represented.
Mr. Avenatti, who had been scheduled to report to federal prison by Sept. 15, is appealing his conviction and sentencing in the extortion case. It is one of several criminal entanglements facing the publicity-minded lawyer.
In another criminal case in which he awaits trial, Mr. Avenatti has been accused of stealing $300,000 in proceeds from a book written by Ms. Daniels. He has maintained his innocence in that case.
In California, federal prosecutors in the fraud case said that Mr. Avenatti had lied about his business income not just to his clients, but also to an I.R.S. collection agent, creditors, a bankruptcy court and a bankruptcy trustee.
Mr. Avenatti said on Tuesday that the government had suppressed key evidence that would prove his innocence.
“And if I can be denied that due process as a well-known white guy, imagine what it looks like for people who are disadvantaged or Black or brown,” he said.
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