Ex-U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown won't get most of $43K before new trial, judge says

Former U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown shouldn’t get back most of about $43,000 the government took from her before her fraud conviction was overturned last year, a federal judge in Jacksonville has decided.

U.S. District Judge Timothy Corrigan ordered the government to return $12,301 in fees and restitution that hadn’t been distributed yet to people identified as fraud victims in her 2017 trial.

But he said the rest — $31,062 — won’t be returned to Brown while she’s getting ready for a repeat trial in the coming months.

Brown had pointed to other cases where forfeited money was returned after convictions were reversed, but Corrigan said those examples were “in a different procedural posture” that didn’t apply to the 12-term Democratic firebrand from Jacksonville.

“While Brown’s conviction has been vacated, in contrast with all of these cases, she is facing imminent retrial on 18 counts of the original indictment, the legal sufficiency of which has not been challenged,” the judge wrote in a ruling he signed Tuesday.

An appeals court threw out Brown’s conviction in May because it decided Corrigan shouldn’t have dismissed a juror who said the “Holy Spirit” had told him Brown was innocent. The appellate court in Atlanta said that decision had affected Brown’s right to trial before a jury of her peers but the court didn’t question any of the evidence from the case and sent the case back to be decided again.

Brown had asked for the money back while she was trying to hire a lawyer for the new trial, but in November she was approved to have court-appointed counsel.

New defense attorneys Richard Komando and Sandra K. Young asked this month for a delay in the trial, which was scheduled to start next month. Corrigan said earlier this month he would grant some delay and scheduled a phone conference on Monday to set a new trial date.

Corrigan's order on the money left open the possibility for Brown, who served about two years on a five-year prison sentence before being released over pandemic health concerns, to get the money back later if she's found not guilty in the new trial.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Judge says feds won't refund most of $43K to ex-U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown