Stewart Parnell’s legal professional, Amy Lee Copeland, requested an extension for submitting an Appellant’s Transient, which was granted by the clerk for the eleventh Ciricuit Courtroom of Appeals in Atlanta.
Copeland was to have filed the temporary by June 26. The extension means the temporary isn’t due till July 25, and the Appendix is due Aug. 1. Copeland’s cause for requesting the extension and the Clerk’s reasoning for granting the request was not recorded within the court docket docket.
In the meantime, the Division of Justice has assigned Stuart E. Walker from the U.S. Legal professional’s workplace for the Center District of Georgia as the federal government lead counsel for Parnell’s attraction.
The most recent extension comes as a part of Stewart Parnell’s Habeas Corpus petition filed nearly 4 years in the past, which is now on attraction to the eleventh Circuit.
Stewart and his brother Michael Parnell had been convicted by a 2014 jury trial in Albany, GA. Each had been related to the now-defunct Peanut Company of America, which was discovered answerable for the 2008-09 multistate Salmonella outbreak that sickened a whole bunch and killed a number of.
For his or her a number of felony convictions, Steward Parnell was sentenced to twenty-eight years in federal jail, and Michael Parnell was sentenced to twenty years. The Parnell brothers are each in search of to vacate the rest of their sentences via Habeas Corpus filings.
The Parnells filed petitions for federal Writs of Habeas Corpus, below 18 U.S.C. §2254, which is for these in federal custody. The Latin phrase “habeas corpus” interprets into “you’ve got the physique.” A petition for the writ claims somebody is being detained in opposition to their constitutional rights. A Habeas Corpus petition claims the arrest, sentence or trial violated constitutional legislation, making imprisonment illegal.
Ineffective help of trial counsel is the most typical subject cited in Habeas Corpus petitions and each of the Parnell brothers have raised that declare.
Stewart was first to file on Sept. 6, 2019. His attorneys wrote: “Stewart Parnell owned the Peanut Company of America (“PCA”), a peanut processing plant in Blakely, Georgia – a small city in southwest Georgia 48 miles southwest of Albany.
“In 2014, Mr. Parnell was convicted of conspiracy, the introduction of adulterated and misbranded meals into interstate commerce, interstate shipments fraud, wire fraud, and obstruction of justice stemming from a salmonella outbreak tied to PCA. After an unsuccessful direct attraction, United States v. Parnell, 723 Fed. Appx. 745 (eleventh Cir. 2018), Mr. Parnell now exhibits that his trial counsel supplied ineffective help by failing to maneuver for a change of venue or to strike jurors for trigger who knew about allegations of deaths ensuing from the salmonella outbreak.”
Michael Parnell filed his Habeus Corpus petition a few month later.
After submitting their petitions, the Parnells every scored a victory when the Justice of the Peace Decide determined the problems raised had been worthy of an evidentiary listening to. Justice of the Peace Decide Thomas Q. Langstaff for the Center District of Georgia presided over the hearings in late Could 2021 in the identical Albany, GA, courthouse the place the Parnells had been convicted.
Federal marshals delivered the Parnells to the evidentiary hearings they usually had been capable of commerce witness and exhibit lists. However after it was throughout, Langstaff dominated in opposition to their petitions in his advice to the Center District of Georgia, and the trial choose, W. Louis Sands, agreed.
The ultimate denial by the Center District of Georgia left an attraction to the eleventh Circuit as the following choice. Stewart Parnell’s petition arrived there first and it has already cleared one large impediment by profitable a movement “for a certificates of appealability.”
Whereas “granted partly,” U.S. Circuit Decide Andrew L. Brasher has permitted Stewart Parnell to attraction on two vital points:
1.) whether or not the distinct court docket erred in figuring out that Parnell couldn’t set up a presumption of jury prejudice, based mostly on antagonistic pretrial publicity, below Skilling v. United States; and
2.) whether or not a exhibiting of presumed jury prejudice below Skilling, operates to ascertain each prongs of an ineffective help of counsel declare, based mostly on the counsels’ failure to maneuver for a change of venue.
Michael Parnell’s attraction to the eleventh Circuit was filed on Could 26. He’s represented by two Virginia attorneys, Elliott M. Harding and William J. Dinkin. His appealability request was filed on June 15.
Earlier than taking his petition as much as the Atlanta court docket, Michael Parnell was profitable in getting his conviction report corrected by the Center District. On the suggestion of his Bureau of Prisons (BOP) case supervisor, Parnell’s Introduction of Adulterated Meals offenses was corrected to “Introduction of Misbranded Meals.”
It was Nov. 10, 2008, when the CDC’s PulseNet workers first famous a small and extremely dispersed multistate cluster of 13 Salmonella Typhimurium isolates with an uncommon DNA fingerprint or pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) sample reported from 12 states. By April 20, 2009, 714 folks in 46 states had been confirmed with the outbreak pressure of Salmonella Typhimurium related to the Peanut Company of America (PCA) facility in Blakely, GA. 9 deaths had been a direct results of the outbreak, in accordance with the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention.
Prison costs associated to the outbreak had been filed in 2013 in opposition to 5 PCA managers and executives. Solely the Parnell brothers stay in federal custody.
Stewart Parnell, 68, has 15 extra years to serve. He’s held at West Virginia’s Hazelton federal jail. Michael Parnell, 64, has eight years remaining on his sentence on the federal lockup at Fort Dix, NJ.
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