Mobile County License Commissioner Kim Hastie, who was acquitted of every felony public corruption count against her earlier this month, is now asking a federal judge to throw out the single charge on which jurors did convict her.
Jurors found Hastie not guilty on 16 of 17 public corruption counts following her trial, but convicted her on one charge tied to the improper release of an email list compiled from people who had obtained driver’s licenses through her office. Prosecutors said the release ran afoul of the federal Driver’s Privacy Protection Act. The list in question was reportedly used by a mayoral campaign in 2013 to target potential voters.
The conviction carries a maximum penalty of a $5,000 fine, with no possibility of jail time. Sentencing on the charge is currently scheduled for September.
Hastie’s attorneys have filed a motion seeking either an acquittal on the remaining charge or a new trial, arguing that the privacy law prosecutors used to convict her does not apply to her office in the first place. In their filing, the attorneys contend that the Mobile County License Commission cannot simply be assumed to qualify as a “state department of motor vehicles” under the statute’s definitions, and that the release of email addresses specifically falls outside the kind of personal information the law was written to protect.
The defense filing argues that many email addresses, unlike physical identifiers such as hair or eye color, reveal little or nothing about the person behind them and pose no comparable safety risk if disclosed. Prosecutors have until early July to respond to the motion.
The corruption case is separate from a related tax evasion charge facing Hastie and her husband, in which a federal judge declared a mistrial last month after jurors could not reach a unanimous verdict. At the defense’s request, jury selection for that retrial has been pushed back, with the trial itself expected to follow later in the summer.
The mixed outcome closes out one chapter of a legal saga that has closely tracked Hastie’s tenure overseeing the county’s license and revenue-related functions, even as the separate tax case continues to work its way through federal court.