A federal judge presiding over the corruption trial of Mobile County License Commissioner Kim Hastie ruled largely against the defense in mid-2015, clearing the way for jurors to weigh most of the charges against Hastie and her deputy as the trial neared its conclusion.
U.S. District Judge Kristi DuBose rejected defense motions seeking to dismiss conspiracy, mail fraud and wire fraud charges against Hastie and Deputy License Commissioner Ramona Yeager. DuBose also ruled that jurors could consider separate allegations that Hastie lied to federal investigators and improperly shared personal information from county records when she provided an email list to a mayoral campaign in 2013. The judge did, however, hold off on deciding what to do with a set of extortion counts, expressing skepticism about whether prosecutors had cleared the legal bar required to prove that charge.
Those extortion counts centered on allegations that Hastie pressured a local computer consultant who held a contract with the License Commission into donating door prizes for office Christmas parties and contributing to her campaign. The consultant testified that he complied because he feared losing his contract, but DuBose noted that fear alone isn’t enough under federal law — prosecutors need evidence that Hastie made an actual threat a reasonable person would recognize as coercive. Prosecutors pointed to Hastie’s own admission to an FBI agent that she had repeatedly threatened to fire the consultant, along with an internal office list tracking which vendors had donated to the Christmas party.
The defense spent much of the trial arguing that Hastie’s spending decisions, while perhaps questionable in process, amounted to an accounting dispute rather than criminal conduct, and that she acted within her authority as an elected official to produce newsletters and hire outside marketing and lobbying help for her office. Character witnesses called on Hastie’s behalf during the trial included a former Mobile County sheriff and a former state legislator. Yeager’s defense called two former License Commission employees to vouch for her conduct in office. Prosecutors, meanwhile, called a sitting county commissioner as a rebuttal witness regarding how a fee added to license tags was meant to fund computer kiosks rather than other office expenses.
With closing arguments set for the following morning, attorneys on both sides offered dueling assessments of how the case would land with jurors, and the judge’s rulings narrowed, without eliminating, the range of charges the jury would ultimately have to sort through in reaching a verdict on the years-long public corruption case.