Legal News

Judge in Kuehne Case Finds Feds? Charge ?Disturbing?

By Ashby Jones

We’ve spilled a goodly amount of pixels on the Ben Kuehne situation going on down in Miami. The recent news: In a pretrial hearing, the judge in the case, U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke, said she found the government’s central charge against Kuehne “disturbing.” The money-laundering conspiracy charge gave her pause, she said, because it implied any defense lawyer could be prosecuted for accepting tainted fees. Click here for the Miami Herald story; here for past LB posts on the Kuehne situation, here for a recent article on the case by the currently vacationing Dan Slater.

Kuehne (pictured) was indicted earlier this year after vouching for Colombian drug lord Fabio Ochoa’s $5.2 million in legal payments to his high-profile defense attorney, Roy Black, in an international cocaine-trafficking case in 2001-03. According to an indictment unsealed in February, Kuehne and two codefendants are charged with conspiring to launder drug profits because they vouched for the alleged tainted legal fees that Ochoa, the one-time Medellín cartel boss, paid to Black and others on his defense team. Ochoa was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison.

The case has galvanized the defense bar in South Florida. The community held a fund-raiser for Kuehne back in May and has consistently expressed disbelief over the government’s case. “They’re putting a knife in the back of the Sixth Amendment,” said David O. Markus, an attorney representing the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, which filed a brief supporting Kuehne. At the pretrial conference last week, however, prosecutors stood by their money-laundering case. “The evidence will show [the money Kuehne vouched for] was dirty from the start,” said prosecutor Robert Feitel.

The trial is scheduled for January 20.

Photo: Getty Images

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on December 01, 2008 (boomark / email).