Four Johnston County defense attorneys and a former court clerk pleaded guilty Monday to illegally dismissing traffic cases, including citations for driving while impaired.
Chad Lee and Lee Hatch both pleaded guilty to 10 counts each of felony obstruction of justice and altering official case records and one count of criminal conspiracy. Lee was sentenced to at least four years in prison, while Hatch received a prison sentence of at least 3½ years.
Both men were fined $10,000. They also agreed to surrender their law licenses, cooperate in the state investigation of the ticket-fixing scheme and reimburse clients for the legal fees they collected in the cases – $28,000 from Lee and $14,200 from Hatch.
Vann Sauls pleaded guilty to four counts of misdemeanor obstruction of justice and was sentenced to 90 days in jail, suspended to three years on probation. He also was ordered to pay a $2,500 fine and to perform 100 hours of community service.
Jack McLamb pleaded guilty to three counts of misdemeanor obstruction of justice, was fined $1,000 and was placed on probation for three years. He will have to serve three weekends in the Johnston County jail, however, because of a DWI conviction he had when he was in college.
Both Sauls and McLamb were ordered not to represent any criminal defendants while on probation, and they agreed to take continuing legal education classes before practicing law again. Sauls agreed to reimburse clients $2,350 for the legal fees he collected in the cases, while McLamb has already repaid his clients.
Former deputy court clerk Portia Snead pleaded guilty to two counts of misdemeanor obstruction of justice. She was sentenced to 45 days in jail, suspended to 18 months unsupervised probation.
Snead was the only one of the five to apologize in court for their actions.
Along with former Johnston County Assistant District Attorney Cyndi Jaeger, the four attorneys and Snead were indicted last March on charges that they altered court records and knowingly used illegal dismissal forms to get traffic cases against 36 people dropped.
Seventy dismissal forms with Jaeger's signature on them were filed after she left her job in September 2007, according to the indictments. The dismissal forms were filed for clients of the four defense attorneys. Snead deleted the attorneys' names from at least two cases from the courthouse computer system.
The majority of the defendants involved were clients of Lee, a former Johnston County prosecutor. McLamb's cases were traffic offenses and didn't involve DWI.
Source
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment