Pain Relief Network

Nov 21, 2006
By: Joe Carlson
NWI Times (IN)

HAMMOND | Gary lawyer Jerry Jarrett has come one step closer to a federal jail cell, although the defense attorney says he still has high hopes of convincing a judge to toss his conviction for laundering clients’ drug money.

The U.S. Supreme Court decided last week not to hear Jarrett’s argument that he should be freed because he claimed he was the victim of vindictive prosecution in 2004.

One day after the Supreme Court denial, First Assistant U.S. Attorney David Capp recommended that a judge sentence Jarrett to serve more than five years in prison and pay at least $92,000 in restitution.

Jarrett was scheduled to receive his sentence Monday, but U.S. District Judge William Lee delayed the sentencing hearing until next March while Jarrett puts together a post-trial argument claiming the government had insufficient evidence to convict him.

A federal jury convicted Jarrett in 2004 of taking $20,000 for laundering $92,000 in illicit profits from two of his drug-dealer clients, Carlos Ripoll and Gregory Goode. Ripoll and Goode both testified that Jarrett disguised the payments as investments in a failed novelty business he owned, selling products to left-handed people.

But after the conviction in Lee’s court, the judge took the unusual step of overturning the jury’s verdict, saying government prosecutors had pursued the case against Jarrett in order to interfere with Jarrett’s successful defense work in a different high-profile case.

Jarrett had been defending Dr. Jong Bek, a Gary doctor charged with murder for allegedly selling prescriptions for pain killers that led to the deaths of two people. Jarrett successfully had Bek’s state murder charges dropped for lack of evidence, but Bek was subsequently charged and convicted of federal drug distribution with a different defense attorney.

In overturning Jarrett’s conviction, Lee found that the timing of the charges against Jarrett seemed suspicious because the information had existed for years, yet Jarrett was only charged after his success in the Bek murder case embarrassed prosecutors.

Federal appeals judges in the Seventh Circuit disagreed with Lee and reinstated the conviction, and last week’s denial by the Supreme Court meant that Lee was free to sentence Jarrett for money laundering.

Contacted at his home in Hammond on Monday, Jarrett said he plans to file motions in the next two weeks that he hopes will prove there was insufficient evidence at his 2004 trial for a conviction.

http://nwitimes.com/articles/2006/11/21/news/
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