Tom Girardi’s personal testimony throughout his legal trial confirmed he was mentally competent as a result of it was according to the “predominant protection argument” that it was the previous Girardi Keese CFO, Christopher Kamon, who stole tens of millions of {dollars} from the Los Angeles agency.
That is in keeping with federal prosecutors in Los Angeles who, in a Tuesday submitting, disagreed that Girardi, 85, ought to have his Aug. 27 conviction tossed out as a result of he was not mentally competent sufficient to grasp his personal trial. Girardi’s attorneys, who’re all federal public defenders, argued final month that their consumer, who’s the estranged husband of Erika Jayne, a star on “The Actual Housewives of Beverly Hills,” doesn’t even remember the verdict, which discovered him responsible of 4 counts of wire fraud.
“On direct examination, defendant testified according to the primary protection argument that co-defendant Christopher Kamon was liable for the fraud scheme at Girardi Keese because of his oversight of the agency’s accounting division,” prosecutors wrote. “When pressed on cross-examination, defendant denied stealing consumer cash and tried to clarify the non-payment of consumer settlement funds by citing varied causes together with shoppers’ drug issues, liens, and different holdbacks.”
Girardi’s movement for a brand new trial, they argued, merely rehashed claims that U.S. District Decide Josephine Staton, of the Central District of California, rejected in her Jan. 2 competency order. Staton discovered that Girardi was “clearly feigning cognitive impairment” by late 2020 and early 2021, throughout which lots of the occasions within the authorities’s case happened.
“Regardless of repeated assertions that he wouldn’t search to reopen competency proceedings, defendants’ movement for a brand new trial is a transparent try to just do that,” prosecutors wrote.
Along with his testimony, Girardi’s “audible, public interactions together with his counsel” argue in opposition to a movement for brand new trial, prosecutors added.
“For instance,” they wrote, “in a voice that could possibly be overheard at authorities’s counsel desk, defendant on a number of events throughout trial requested his counsel when it was his flip to testify and in addition instructed his counsel that it was his ‘ass on the road.'”
“These feedback present that defendant was conscious about the proceedings in opposition to him and eagerly awaited his alternative to help in his protection by testifying,” they wrote.
‘Effectively-Worn Territory’
Girardi’s new trial movement attaches a sealed declaration from one in every of his public defenders, Alejandro Barrientos, explaining that his consumer was “unable to recollect what occurred from one trial day to the following, and even from one witness to the following.”
Additionally connected was a declaration from a caretaker who drove Girardi to and from his assisted dwelling facility and the downtown Los Angeles courthouse throughout every day of trial. On the drive there, she wrote, he would repeatedly ask questions, “suggesting that he believed that he was going to court docket as an legal professional to characterize a consumer,” comparable to whether or not anybody from the workplace was on the courthouse, or which division he ought to go to.
Each points are “well-worn territory within the court docket’s evaluation of defendant’s psychological talents,” prosecutors wrote in Tuesday’s submitting.
U.S. District Decide Josephine Staton. Credit score: Joe Barnet through Wikimedia Commons
“The movement merely recycles the identical important arguments defendant made throughout the competency proceedings, particularly that his reminiscence points and private hygiene issues render him unable to grasp the proceedings or meaningfully help in his protection,” they wrote.
Girardi’s decision to testify in his personal protection confirmed that he knew what was occurring throughout the trial, they wrote. Though he couldn’t recall the title of his personal legal professional, or lots of the shoppers who had testified in court docket, Girardi forged blame on Kamon, who confronted a separate legal trial. On Oct. 11, Kamon, 51, who has been incarcerated in federal jail for 2 years, pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud and agreed to pay $3.1 million to victims.
Girardi, Kamon and one other defendant, David Lira, a former Girardi Keese companion and Girardi’s son-in-law, face separate costs of stealing $3 million from victims of the Lion Air crash in 2018 in Indonesia. However federal prosecutors in Chicago have stated they might not pursue the charges in opposition to Girardi, relying on his jail sentence in California.
U.S. District Decide Mary Rowland of the Northern District of Illinois has scheduled a Dec. 19 listening to for an replace.
