Fraud conviction reversed on speedy trial grounds

Listen to this article

A federal appeals court has reversed a fraud conviction on speedy trial grounds.

After a three-and-one-half year delay, defendant Aleksandr Pikus was convicted of conspiring to launder the proceeds generated by a network of Brooklyn medical clinics that were allegedly defrauding Medicare and Medicaid.

His appellate attorneys argued that the district court should have granted their motions to dismiss the charges on violations of the Speedy Trial Act.

They claimed that “the district court improperly excluded time based on the complexity of the case without determining, on the record, why the case was complex or that such exclusions outweighed the best interest of the public and the defendant in a speedy trial.”

They argued that the excessive pre-trial delay was not caused by the supposed complexity of the prosecution, but by the government’s delayed production of documents by state and federal agencies.

In a decision released Thursday, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit agreed.

The federal Speedy Trial Act requires a criminal case to be tried within 70 days, with some exceptions.

“Yet here, despite the defendant’s repeated requests for a speedy trial, this case took more than three years to get to jury selection. This was primarily the result of the government’s delay in producing discovery and the district court’s failure to effectively respond,” the Second Circuit wrote.

“Throughout a lengthy discovery process that spanned several years, the government sporadically and haphazardly produced various audit documents requested by Pikus,” according to the decision.

“Pikus twice moved for dismissal of the indictment on speedy trial grounds before being convicted on all counts. Those motions to dismiss should have been granted,” the court wrote.

“The district court’s exclusions of time throughout this protracted process were frequently perfunctory, and often based on the court’s erroneous determination,” the Second Circuit wrote.

Following a six-day trial, a jury convicted Pikus of all counts and he was sentenced to 13 years in prison and two years of post-release supervision.

“While we doubt that a case can be designated as ‘complex’ solely because it involves a lot of documents, what is obvious is that any such supposed complexity cannot support a three-and-a-half year delay under the Speedy Trial Act when the cause of most of the delay is the government’s refusal to produce most of the documents,” the court wrote.

[email protected] / (585) 232-2035