A federal judge issued a terse two-sentence order Wednesday denying former Little Rock police officer Randall Tremayn Robinson's post-trial motions for acquittal and a new trial.
Earlier this month, defense attorney Bill James asked Chief U.S. District Judge Brian Miller to vacate Robinson's June 18 conviction on a charge of making a false statement to FBI agents, and to grant him a new trial on that charge. James argued that evidence presented at Robinson's jury trial wasn't sufficient to support the charge, and complained that prosecutors filed the charge out of "vindictiveness" anyway.
Prosecutors responded this week, explaining at length why they thought the evidence presented was sufficient, and denying the allegation of vindictiveness, saying that sometimes charges are rewritten after a mistrial for the purpose of clarification.
Robinson was originally tried by a federal jury last summer on the corruption charges and a separate marijuana delivery charge. Jurors convicted him on the marijuana charge but deadlocked on the corruption charges, which were retried in June along with the new charge accusing him of lying to federal agents investigating the corruption charges. The second jury acquitted Robinson on the corruption charges and convicted him of the false-statement charge.
Miller's order didn't elaborate on his reasons for denying Robinson's motions.
Robinson is scheduled for sentencing on both the marijuana delivery conviction and the false-statement conviction on Oct. 16.
The corruption charges alleged that Robinson knowingly helped his older half brother, a senior police officer, escort a shipment of what they believed to be 1,000 pounds of marijuana across the city, while in uniform and using their marked police units, in exchange for $5,000 cash apiece in March of 2012.
Robinson's half-brother, Mark Anthony Jones, is serving 81/2 years in federal prison after pleading guilty before last summer's trial, admitting that he helped escort the large load of marijuana -- which was actually a small amount of marijuana used as a prop in an FBI sting. His sentence was upheld earlier this month by a three-judge panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis.
In Robinson's trials, James told both juries that there was no direct proof showing that Robinson "knowingly" participated in the escort of one of two vans that purportedly held the large shipment of marijuana. James said Jones may have never told his younger sibling why he wanted him to follow one of the vans. He also reminded them that they never saw photographic evidence of Jones passing along to Robinson any of the $10,000 cash that Jones was filmed taking from an informant after the escort.
The false-statement charge accused Robinson of lying when he denied using his police car to follow one of the vans, both of which were under FBI surveillance at the time.
Metro on 07/17/2014