BULLETIN: Andy Bowdoin Trial Date Set For Late September Of 2012; Both Sides In Case Have Nearly A Year To Prepare Before Jury Will Hear Ponzi Testimony
BULLETIN: The Ponzi scheme trial of AdSurfDaily President Andy Bowdoin is scheduled to begin on Sept. 24, 2012, 11 months from today, the PP Blog has learned.
A status hearing on the case was held in the District of Columbia Friday. U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer presided.
Bowdoin is charged with wire fraud, securities fraud and selling unregistered securities. He was arrested in December 2010 and freed on bail.
Collyer laid out the following schedule, the Blog has learned:
Pretrial motions are due by Aug. 1, 2012. Responses are due two weeks later, on Aug. 15, 2012. A pretrial conference is scheduled a week after that, on Aug. 22, 2012. The actual trial is slated to begin a little more than a month later, on Sept. 24, 2012.
How many days or weeks the trial is expected to last was not immediately clear. Bowdoin, 76, claimed in court filings to have more than 100 witnesses. How many witnesses he’ll actually call is unclear.
Prosecutors have claimed to be in possession of hundreds of thousands of pages of evidentiary material.
Depending on when the trial ends next year, Bowdoin may be 78 before he hears a jury verdict.
In August 2008 — in the earliest days of the ASD case — some analysts predicted that the litigation could consume three or more years. The trial date, as it stands, reflects that the ASD-related litigation will have entered its fifth year when a jury is impaneled. The seizures of ASD-related assets began on Aug. 1, 2008, a date parts of the Northern Hemisphere were experiencing a total eclipse of the sun.
By coincidence, the date for pretrial motions — Aug. 1, 2012 — is the fourth anniversary of the seizures. When that date passes, the litigation will enter its fifth year.
Some ASD members claimed in August 2008 that ASD would be cleared and that matters would be settled by the Wednesday following the Friday seizures. Just days after the quick-settlement claims were made, Bowdoin described federal prosecutors and the U.S. Secret Service as “Satan.”
The ASD case has featured many bizarre claims.
How much do you want to bet he still says “we don’t have enough time to prepare, my attorneys are incompetent” etc.
I’m betting it never goes to trial, he doesn’t have the money to defend himself, and if he uses a public defender it will not only destroy his credibility with the Kool Aid Krowd, he’ll also be under a lot of pressure from his (publicly funded) defense attorney to plea out. And he will, I think.
Unless a case involves some populist cause or generates genuine national interest, criminal federal trials where the crime is largely undisputed and the evidence overwhelming don’t get to turn into a circus. Andy is not going to gather the type of media attention he thinks he will. And trust me on this, a public defender will crawl on glass for you if they think it’s a good cause, but can you see a real attorney who will risk their professional reputation and put in the extra time when they’re already overworked and underpaid, for Andy Bowdoin? I don’t see it.
My bet, he’ll plead out, and get something like 48 months. I’ll hedge that by saying he just might, sometime close to trial, fire his court appointed attorney and start spouting his sov’run gibberish, either on his own, with some Arby’s Indian type pseudo lawyer or a real genuine, but certifiable Attorney with some reputation for defending any number of crackpots and lost causes. Going to trial is gonna cost him, though. I think the sentencing guideline would put him away for 144 months, and he could easily get a few upward departures from there, for lack of remorse, amount involved, previous criminal activity just to name a few.
Andy, if you’re listening, plead out. The sooner you start serving the sentence the more likely you’ll actually live to get out. Four years you can do (no parole in Federal Prison, BTW) but 12 years in a Federal Prison isn’t gonna happen, that’s effectively life without parole for you.
Our Judicial system is so slow. It takes years for people to go to court and months sometimes for Juries to decided the fate of the criminal.