Federal prosecutors filed a motion this week seeking to block Mobile County License Commissioner Kim Hastie’s request to be tried separately three times rather than once on the 18 criminal counts contained in her federal indictment.
In court filings, Assistant U.S. Attorney Greg Bordenkicher argued that splitting the case into three trials would waste judicial resources rather than protect Hastie’s rights. “She believes a single trial would hamper ‘judicial efficiency’ and she attempts to persuade the Court that three separate trials would be a better use of the Court’s time and resources,” Bordenkicher wrote. “The position is wishful thinking.”
Hastie’s defense attorneys had argued in a February 27 filing that combining all charges into a single trial would force them into a “one-size-fits-all strategy” that could unfairly prejudice her defense, calling the approach “repugnant to the spirit of the Constitution.”
Hastie and her husband, John, were indicted after federal authorities alleged the couple failed to report $58,633 in income to the IRS, income prosecutors say came from brokering land transactions and from timber cutting and land clearing services. Additional charges added in January accused Hastie of coordinating a scheme to forward thousands of residents’ emails to a political consulting firm, which was then used to send messages expressing Hastie’s support for Sandy Stimpson during his 2013 campaign for Mobile mayor.
In a separate filing on the same day, prosecutors moved to exclude testimony from Semoon Chang, a former University of South Alabama economics professor Hastie had hired to produce an unpublished study. That study concluded that merging the Mobile County Revenue and License Commissions would save taxpayers roughly $1 million. Prosecutors said Hastie solicited the study in October without informing Mobile County commissioners and never actually paid Chang for the work.
Bordenkicher argued Chang’s testimony was irrelevant to the criminal charges and risked misleading jurors. “Dr. Chang has no knowledge of any issues that are necessary to rendering a verdict,” Bordenkicher wrote, adding that the study lacked “well-researched, independent, transparent, academic” grounding and that prosecutors disputed its findings and methodology entirely. He also suggested Hastie intended to use Chang’s testimony to improperly bolster her own credibility with self-serving, hearsay-based evidence.
Hastie’s case was scheduled to go to trial in May, with both the trial-structure dispute and the admissibility of Chang’s testimony left for the presiding federal judge to resolve ahead of proceedings. The case has drawn significant attention in Mobile County, where Hastie has served as an elected license commissioner overseeing vehicle registration, hunting and fishing licenses, and other county services.