Federal prosecutors are rejecting claims of anti-Black bias in their criminal case against former Dodger Yasiel Puig, calling the allegations part of a last-ditch attempt to avoid trial — one that also included a “personal appeal” to the prosecutors’ boss with a request that it be kept secret.
Puig faces charges of lying to federal authorities and obstruction of justice in the investigation of a sports gambling operation run by former minor league baseball player Wayne Nix.
At a news conference and in court filings, Puig’s attorneys have alleged federal prosecutors were “inclined to view Black men as untruthful” and treated white defendants in the investigation differently.
But in a court filing Wednesday, prosecutors vehemently denied the allegation and referred to it as a hollow “eleventh-hour assertion.” In the 40-page filing, Assistant U.S. Atty. Jeff Mitchell argued that Puig’s attorneys only brought up the accusation of bias after other attempts to avoid a trial failed.
Those attempts included a “private personal appeal” to Martin Estrada, U.S. attorney for the Central District of California and the boss of the federal prosecutors in Puig’s criminal case. In the Nov. 28 letter to Estrada, Puig’s attorney Keri Axel, a former federal prosecutor in Southern California, pushed for the case to be resolved in a diversion program, in which the criminal charges could be dismissed or reduced.
Axel also implored the U.S. attorney “to take a meeting, as there are things I can...
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