Breaking news: Buncombe Commish implicated in Medford trial

One last note before I head to the trial today. I didn’t mention this earlier because I thought it would be viewed as “political.”

The Henderson Amusement financial records introduced into evidence by Anna Deaton and corroborated by Jerry Pennington showed a cash outlay of $1,000 to the Buncombe County Commissioners race in 2004. I haven’t seen that reported elsewhere and I haven’t had time this week to obtain the campaign finance records from that race. You heard it here first.

I should note that while Mountain Xpress referred to this as a “legal donation” in its coverage, there is no way that $1,000 in cash could have been legally contributed to commission candidates in the 2004 election. The cash limit at the time was $100 (which is why Medford’s campaign reported dozens of $100 cash donations in the 2002 election, for example.) There were only 9 candidates in that race, so no matter how you split the money, someone received more than the limit.

The candidates were Mark Crawford, Republican; David Gantt, Democrat; Mike Harrison, Republican; Mike Morgan, Republican; Carol Weir Peterson, Democrat; Bill Reynolds, Republican; Bill Stanley, Democrat; and David Young, Democrat. Ed Hay and Nathan Ramsey were candidates for chair. Wonder who got the cash?

Very short update on Medford trial

I’m still covering the trial, though I had to duck out an hour early Wednesday for a board meeting of Biblioworks.org, a charitable foundation I work with which builds and supports rural libraries in Bolivia.

The prosecution ought to finish its case today and the defense will almost certainly start. Tomorrow Judge Tim Ellis will be back in his Virginia court room, so no session here amd I’ll do a complete run-down of this week’s sessions.

The most interesting part of today’s proceeding is likely to be video footage filmed in Rutherford County after the November 2006 election. The meeting was captured with a hidden camera. The defense tried to block use of the film, arguing that the conspiracy depicted in the footage is not directly related to events in Buncombe County and that, in any event, Medford had been voted out and therefore had no power to continue any alleged conspiracy in any meaningful way. The prosecution successfully argued that a conspiracy can continue even when participants are jailed, because conspiracy can include failure to divulge information or continuing attempts to hide previous activity, and also that the conspiracy in Rutherford was part of a region-wide network which included several counties, and that conspirators need not be aware of all other members of a conspiracy in order to be implicated.