Wednesday, February 06, 2019

DOJ files appeal to reverse stinging loss to Bundy clan in Nevada standoff

The Justice Department filed an appeal Wednesday of its devastating defeat against Cliven Bundy in the Nevada standoff, disputing the federal judge’s decision last year to throw out the case based on prosecutorial wrongdoing. The 88-page motion, filed with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, challenged Chief U.S. District Court Judge Gloria Navarro’s blistering finding of “flagrant” misconduct, which prompted her to declare a mistrial in December 2017 and dismiss the charges a month later. U.S. Attorney for Nevada Nicholas A. Trutanich, who took over last month, insisted that the government had “timely disclosed significant discovery,” refuting the judge’s ruling that prosecutors had withheld evidence on items such as an FBI surveillance camera and snipers at the 2014 clash. “To the extent any of the government’s shortcomings constituted Brady violations, they were clearly inadvertent, and certainly not willful,” he said in the motion. “In its ruling dismissing the indictment with prejudice, however, the district court found government errors it had only weeks earlier deemed diligent and reasonable now to be ‘flagrant,’ ‘reckless,’ ‘intentional,’ ‘grossly shocking,’ and in violation of a ‘universal sense of justice.’” The judge’s findings “fail as a matter of law; and the record and the facts do not support the district court’s condemnation of the prosecutors in this case,” the motion said. Bundy attorney Larry Klayman immediately filed a motion to strike the appeal, calling it “frivolous” and arguing that the court had not granted the government’s request for a third extension of the deadline. “To keep this appeal hanging over the head of my client and his co-defendants is more than unconscionable: it is unprofessional and grossly unethical, and calculated only inflict more severe emotional distress on them and to ‘circle the wagons’ around those ‘bad actors’ in this U.S. Attorney’s office who themselves, rather than the defendants, committed crimes,” Mr. Klayman said in his brief...MORE

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