Fmr BP Engineer, Kurt Mix, Seeks Acquittal After Guilty Verdict

Feb. 28

In December, former BP BP -0.02% drilling engineer was acquitted of one count of obstruction of justice and found guilty on another.  His alleged sin, as I have written about here before, was his deletion of innocuous text messages in his role as an engineer tasked with stopping the flow of oil from the Macondo well, which resulted from of the Deep Water Horizon rig explosion (April-July 2010).  Almost two months after that guilty verdict, Mix is asking U.S. District Judge Sandwood Duval, Jr. to toss the decision and, at the least, give him a new trial.

Mix was scheduled to be sentenced to prison on March 26th, but that has now been pushed off to April 23rd while Judge Duval considers Mix’s motion to have the jury’s decision tossed (Rule 29 Motion) and demand a new trial (Rule 33 Motion).  Duval recently ruled on a motion filed by Mix’s lead attorney, Joan McPhee of Ropes & Gray, to have the good judge removed because he had filed a claim against BP for damages sustained to his Grand Isle, LA fishing camp during the BP spill.  While it would seem like a conflict that should be questioned, a judge presiding over the first case of a former BP employee associated with the spill while having a stated bias/case against BP, Duval was outraged.  In denying the motion for his recusal, Duval wrote of McPhee’s motion as being,  “naive at best and disingenuous at its worst.”  Another person in Duval’s courtroom was also a part of requesting damages for property damage done by BP … his law clerk, Janet Daley …. who is also Judge Duval’s wife.

Before moving on, I wanted to add that James Varney wrote for the Times-Picayune about a number of other relationships that Judge Duval has associated with to the BP spill.  Varney wrote:

“… the judge’s son, David Duval, told members of court-appointed investigator Louis Freeh’s staff that he got a job with the Deepwater Horizon claims office after Judge Duval recommended him over lunch with Claims Administrator Patrick Juneau, according to court documents. Juneau recalled the circumstances differently, but in any event David Duval was employed by the claims office until his resignation last October.

 Meanwhile, Judge Duval’s brother, C. Berwick Duval II, and his wife, Judge Duval’s sister-in-law Alexis Duval, are also closely tied to BP lawsuits. Duval, Funderburk, the law firm that also employs Judge Duval’s nephew, Stanwood R. Duval, had filed 29 lawsuits against BP as of last November. The firm also represents Terrebonne Parish and other public entities in BP litigation.

 Alexis Duval became a principal in the Bourgeois Bennettaccounting firm last year. That firm has actively solicited BP work, as CPA reports are a critical piece of showing reduced income in the year following the spill.”

If the judge has so many ties to the BP spill, what ties were there related to members of the jury?  I digress.

Moving on with justice, Mix still is fighting to have his conviction tossed.  In a filing this week, Mix asked for acquittal based on the position that the jury was wrong and could not have used “reasonable doubt” as a basis for finding guilt.  The fact is that there was no evidence, none, presented during the trial that states Mix acted in a way that obstructed justice.  While Mix’s attorneys acknowledge a deletion of text message strings, the strings contained nothing of value related to the oil spill and, further, Mix provided vast amounts of information related to the spill during the crisis.  There was nobody to testify that Mix acted nervous, sought to tell anyone ‘don’t let the government see this’, destroyed electronic devices, shredded anything … NOTHING.  He deleted a text message string that mostly contained messages about lunch plans, yoga lessons and back pains to a friend.  That is the government’s case and a jury’s verdict against an engineer who has no prior record, a long list of great character witnesses and who worked countless hours in midst of the worst man-made disaster to hit the U.S.

The evidence does not match the verdict reached in this case.  Mix’s is not a complicated case but it is one people should be watching.

While Judge Duval has ruled that he would not recuse himself from the case, he has the ability to throw this case out when he rules in March, hopefully, on McPhee’s motion for tossing the case against Mix.  Otherwise, Mix moves to the sentencing phase and faces years in prison.

Beyond this case, Judge Duval has a busy schedule ahead of him.  He is presiding over the case of Robert Kaluza and Donald Vidrine, BP’s top two supervisors who were on the Deepwater Horizon rig at the time of the blowout. Each faces 11 counts of involuntary manslaughter, along with violating the federal Clean Water Act.  Good luck with that one.

 Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/walterpavlo/2014/02/28/fmr-bp-engineer-kurt-mix-seeks-acquittal-after-guilty-verdict/?