Nearly a year after a jury found him guilty of theft and abuse of power, the former sheriff of Limestone County in north Alabama is appealing his felony convictions and seeking a new trial.
In a brief to the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals, attorneys for Mike Blakely, who spent decades as the top law enforcement official in the fast-growing county, argue that state prosecutors did not prove he acted with criminal intent and allege the state did not disclose ahead of the trial that one of the prosecution’s witnesses was under investigation at the time.
After a three-week trial last summer, a jury in downtown Athens found Blakely guilty of stealing $4,000 from his campaign account by funneling the money through Red Brick Strategies, a Huntsville consulting firm owned by Trent Willis. The jurors also found Blakely guilty of obtaining $29,050 in interest free loans from a safe that held money belonging to people incarcerated in the county jail he oversaw as sheriff.
Blakely was Alabama’s longest-serving sheriff until the felony convictions immediately removed him from the office he held for 10 terms spanning 38 years.
The jury acquitted him of eight other charges.
In the appeal filed Monday, Blakely’s attorneys argue that Judge Pamela Baschab, the retired judge specially appointed to the case, should have declared a mistrial after state prosecutors disclosed that one of their witnesses was under investigation.
“Because the State suppressed critical information regarding an investigation in Trent Willis, Mr. Blakely should have been granted a mistrial when evidence of the suppression came to light at trial,” the appeal says.
Willis, a Huntsville political consultant and the disgraced former owner of Red Brick Strategies, was the state’s key witness to the theft charge, for which the jury convicted Blakely. Prosecutors from the Alabama Attorney General’s Office alleged that Blakely had his campaign account pay Willis’ Huntsville firm $7,500 for a $3,500 bill, then deposited a $4,000 refund into his personal account, rather than the campaign account.
After Willis testified for the state, but before the defense could cross examine him, prosecutors asked the judge to instruct Willis that he could plead the Fifth Amendment to avoid incriminating himself. But Willis did not remain silent when cross-examined.
Blakely’s defense was able to question Willis about allegations he stole $100,000 from the campaign account of a state representative, got fired from Huntsville Mayor Tommy Battle’s campaign because of an “inappropriate sexual relationship,” failed to pay taxes, loans and rent, and charged clients for work he never did.
Willis told the jury he “vehemently” disagreed with the allegations.
He testified that he knew little about the nature of the investigation and told the jury that the state had not offered him any deals or immunity in exchange for his testimony against Blakely.
Blakely’s defense team said state prosecutors had not previously disclosed that another division of the attorney general’s office was investigating Willis. State prosecutors denied the allegation and said the defense team knew about the investigation a year earlier.
The judge briefly paused the trial before declining their request for a mistrial and resuming Willis’ testimony.
In his appeal, Blakely’s attorneys also argue that the trial judge should have thrown out his conviction for abuse of power.
“At no point did the State present legally sufficient evidence upon which a jury could conclude that Mr. Blakely intentionally used his office for personal gain in the form of obtaining interest-free loans from the Limestone County jail inmate fund,” the appeal says.
The former jail clerk testified that the sheriff routinely asked her to give him cash from a safe that held money belonging to people incarcerated in Limestone County. She told the jury that each time she gave Blakely the cash, she scribbled an IOU onto a post-it note and put it in the safe.
Blakely eventually gave the clerk 19 checks from his personal bank account to replace the funds, according to financial records shown to the jury. But Blakely routinely asked her to hold the checks — sometimes for weeks — before taking them to the bank, according to testimony.
Louie Wilson, a special agent in the public corruption unit of the Alabama Attorney General’s Office, testified that, there were 271 days during which the clerk held Blakely’s checks to repay the inmate safe. The agent testified that had the clerk cashed those checks on the day Blakely gave them to her, his personal bank account would have been overdrawn.
But in the appeal, Blakely’s attorneys repeated an argument they had made to the jury that found him guilty.
“The evidence clearly demonstrated that no inmate was ever deprived of his money and that no money was ever missing from the inmate fund,” the appeal says.
Judge Baschab sentenced Blakely to three years in jail. But he remains out on $50,000 bond while he appeals the case.
Blakely, a Democrat, is just one of several public officials who have come under scrutiny for corruption in the past few years in Limestone County, one of the state’s fastest-growing counties, and now home to more than 100,000 people.