Reading material piles up for lawyers in Troy Kelley case
Picture two sets of the 32-volume Encyclopedia Britannica. That’s the amount of potential evidence that federal prosecutors turned over in April to indicted state Auditor Troy Kelley and his attorneys.
That was just the first installment. Prosecutors provided two more collections of records for a total of 80,000 or more pages. That’s according to court filings this month in which the prosecution and defense offer competing proposed schedules for revealing their arguments and evidence.
Both sides are preparing for a March trial. Kelley faces charges including tax evasion and money laundering in a case that revolves around his former business tracking real-estate documents.
Prosecutors allege he kept millions of dollars in fees that should have been refunded to mortgage borrowers. Kelley denies he broke the law.
White-collar prosecutions can involve massive amounts of documents that have been known to run into the millions of pages — reportedly reaching 1 billion pages in at least one case.
Kelley’s attorney, Angelo Calfo, wrote that much of what the U.S. Attorney’s Office handed over are records obtained through grand-jury subpoenas.
Others are reports from IRS agents and statements by, interviews with and grand-jury testimony from more than 45 people.
Some documents, he said, are from civil lawsuits related to the criminal case, including transcripts of depositions of Kelley and at least a dozen others.
Calfo denied in a separate court filing this week that he has a conflict of interest representing Kelley because he represented the mother of a former Kelley employee questioned in the investigation.
He said prosecutors who have raised that point didn’t explain how the topic of the questions — a payment Kelley allegedly made to Jason JeRue through his mother — is relevant to the charges against Kelley.
This story was originally published September 18, 2015 at 7:10 AM with the headline "Reading material piles up for lawyers in Troy Kelley case."