U.S. District Judge David Hittner today took the unusual step of issuing a ten page order admonishing prominent Houston criminal defense attorney, Dick Degeurin, for sending a background report about DeGeurin’s client, Lea Fastow, to the Bureau of Prisons.
Mrs. Fastow, wife of ex-Enron Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow, was ordered this week to serve her term for a tax misdemeanor in the cell block-like downtown Houston Federal Detention facility starting in July. DeGeurin had been trying to arrange for her to serve the year in a more comfortable federal minimum security unit in Bryan. DeGeurin’s letter to the Bureau indicated he was sending the report so that the Bureau had all the possible information on Mrs. Fastow before assigning her to a facility to serve her one-year sentence.
Presentencing background reports are routinely sent to the Bureau and both the prosecution and the defense requested that one be sent in this case. However, Judge Hittner refused to send the report in this case, reasoning that the report was based on the felony charges that the government dropped when Mrs. Fastow pled to a misdemeanor tax evasion charge. Judge Hittner contended that the lawyers waived a new report, but DeGeurin and the prosecution apparently did so only because a report already existed and they thought it was fine to send to the Bureau.
Judge Hittner took the unusual step of distributing his order regarding DeGeurin to all the district judges in the Southern District of Texas saying DeGeurin “circumvent(ed) the rulings of the court, as well as the procedures of the United States Probation Office and Federal Bureau of Prisons.”
Judge Hittner previously refused to accept a 5-month prison plea bargain for Mrs. Fastow. Although this is speculation, I suspect that Judge Hittner has not been pleased with the way in which the Enron Task Force handled the case against Mrs. Fastow — i.e., prosecuting her until her husband cut a plea bargain and then agreeing to a minimum level plea with Mrs. Fastow that indicated that they really were not serious about the prosecution in the first place. However, I have no idea why the judge has gone off on DeGeurin, who appears to have done nothing other than vigorously represent his client.
One thing looks certain — I suspect that all parties in any future Enron criminal prosecutions that land in Judge Hittner’s court will file joint motions to recuse him from the case. It was somewhat surprising that Judge Hittner handled the case against Mrs. Fastow because he was a former Enron Corp. shareholder. Neither the prosecution nor the defense in Mrs. Fastow’s case raised that fact as grounds for the judge’s recusal.