Sandy Blunt Appeal
|  Video
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| Amanda Tetlak |
| 10/21/2009 |
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| Last December, the former director of WSI was convicted of a single felony for misspending more than $26,000 of agency funds. Today Blunt and his attorney appeared before the state Supreme Court to appeal his conviction. Blunt`s attorney argued today that the charge should have been acquitted because the judge threw out part of the prosecution`s case. A Bismarck jury last December found Blunt guilty of using Workforce Safety and Insurance agency funds for a series of unauthorized expenses, including meeting costs and moving expenses for an executive, and giving a firefighter`s group a $15,000 grant. And that was the item of contention at Blunt`s Supreme Court Hearing. Judge Romanick ruled there wasn`t enough evidence that Blunt broke the law in that instance, and Blunt`s attorney says the offenses should have been charged separately to give jurors a chance to judge each one. "I don`t understand why you get an acquittal on the entire count," says ND Supreme Court Justice Mary Maring. "It`s kind of like going to an auction sale and the auctioneer is standing up on the table and he says `Well, here`s a box of stuff. I`m just going to sell the box of stuff rather than pulling each individual item so that we can judge each item and what it`s worth.` That`s what happened here," says defense attorney Michael Hoffman. Burleigh County prosecutor Cynthia Feland says the grant was only one example of Blunt`s habit of misspending WSI money. It was part of his overall conduct as the agency`s top administrator. "It just seemed to me that all of these were the same kind of mannerism of how money was being expended with regard to how business was being handled and so that`s why they were all charged as part of one," says Feland. The Supreme Court will review that case and decide at a later time if Sandy Blunt`s charges will be reversed. Blunt was given a two-year deferred sentence, and ordered to pay a $2,000 fine and perform a thousand hours of community service. |
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