By Billy Davis

U.S. District Judge Neal Biggers has agreed with U.S. attorneys that an FBI agent did not mislead a grand jury about payments from Panola businessman Lee Garner to David Chandler.

The court order from Biggers comes after the March bribery trial that convicted Garner, though the federal judge later acquitted Garner of the conviction.  

When he acquitted Garner, Biggers suggested that agent Shannon Wright made “serious misstatements of fact” to the grand jury, one of several displeasures noted by the federal judge and aimed at federal prosecutors.

After Biggers released his strongly-worded message, Assistant U.S. Attorney Clay Dabbs suggested in a Motion to Clarify that Biggers might have mistaken Chandler’s testimony for Wright’s.

Prosecutors were entering the Motion to Clarify after “scouring” trial transcripts of Wright’s testimony and the testimony of Keith Luke, an investigator with the USDA, Dabbs wrote. Prosecutors did find testimony in which Chandler alleged that had taken place, he suggested.

Biggers, responding to the government’s motion, concurred with Dabbs. After reviewing transcripts from the trial, the judge wrote that it was a “government cooperating individual witness who made the misstatement.”

The judge was referring to Chandler, a key witness for the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Chandler’s testimony to the grand jury that Garner padded his nursing service bills to Tri-Lakes was “proven false” during the trial, Biggers wrote.

The post-trial filing from Dabbs was the first one entered by federal prosecutors after the judge acquitted Garner on four charges that led to his conviction by a federal jury.

Co-defendant Ray Shoemaker was also acquitted of two charges and granted a new trial on a third.
Court documents from the federal courthouse in Oxford show the U.S. Attorney’s Office is appealing Garner’s acquittal and Shoemaker’s acquittal to the U.S. Court of Appeals in New Orleans.

Biggers reversed Garner’s conviction after concluding federal prosecutors failed to prove Chandler was acting as an “agent” of Tri-Lakes, which the government claimed in its indictment of the former county official.