HOUSTON – A United States federal district judge has started hearing arguments as to whether disgraced Texas financier Allen Stanford is fit to go on trial on January 23.
Stanford, 61, has been imprisoned as a flight risk since his June 2009 indictment on charges of defrauding investors of US$7 billion, through a Ponzi scheme, built on allegedly bogus certificates of deposit at his Antigua-based Stanford International Bank (SIB).
Stanford has claimed he can’t recall family vacations, his business dealings or romantic encounters with women because “59 years were stolen” by a jailhouse beating and anxiety drugs, according to a government lawyer arguing that his memory loss is faked.
US District Judge David Hittner Tuesday began the hearing, which may last for four days, prosecutors said.
Depending on Hittner’s ruling, Stanford will face trial in January or return to prison for further rehabilitation.
Assistant US Attorney Gregg J. Costa said in court papers that Stanford’s performance on a battery of mental tests was “worse than subjects with advanced dementia or mental retardation”.
But Ali R. Fazel, one of Stanford’s attorneys, said that doctors’ testimony will show that the Texas financier suffered a traumatic brain injury made worse by “the cocktail of medications” administered in a US federal lockup.
Prosecutors said they will argue that Stanford is feigning amnesia to avoid being tried for defrauding investors in the “massive” Ponzi scheme.
Two doctors who evaluated him at a prison hospital in North Carolina are to testify in support of the prosecutors.
The doctors concluded that Stanford doesn’t suffer from “a mental illness which would interfere with his ability to understand the nature and consequences of the proceedings against him or to assist properly in his defense,” Costa said.
Defence lawyers said they plan to call as many as 11 witnesses to testify that the former financier suffers lingering effects – including memory loss – from an addiction to anxiety drugs he took in prison and a head injury suffered in a 2009 jailhouse assault.
Among proposed defence witnesses are Dick DeGuerin, Stanford’s first criminal-defense attorney, and Stanford’s mother.
The defence is asking for a further delay of the trial based on his mental impairments.
Judge Hittner delayed Stanford’s trial, first set for last January, after three doctors testified that the financier was incapable of assisting in his defence because of his drug dependency and potential effects from the head injury.
Prosecutors say Stanford skimmed more than one billion US dollars of investor funds to acquire a fleet of jets and yachts, multiple mansions and a private Caribbean island, as well as to give money to women with whom he had children. (CMC)
