Kouri Richins' attorney said prosecutors have been listening to privileged calls and restricting Richins' ability to communicate with her attorneys.
www.ksl.com
5/17/24
PARK CITY — Attorneys for Kouri Richins, the woman accused of fatally poisoning her husband and then writing a book about loss, asked the court to Friday to disqualify the team of prosecutors from continuing to work on the case.
Richins' attorneys allege Summit County chief prosecutor Brad Bloodworth has been improperly using communications between Richins and her attorneys — which the attorneys say should be considered private under client-attorney privilege — while preparing the case against Richins. They ask in a motion to the court for all prosecutors to be dismissed but "specifically" Bloodworth.
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At Wednesday's hearing, Bloodworth said he was not prepared to argue about whether the exhibits his team had prepared were admissible. He said prosecutors had no advance warning to the defense's opposition to the evidence. District Court Judge Richard Mrazik said he would try to reschedule the hearing as quickly as possible because Richins remains incarcerated. The new preliminary hearing has been scheduled for June 18-20.
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Lazaro in a court filing on Friday alleges that prosecutors had recordings of privileged calls and restricted Richins' ability to communicate with her attorney, hindering her right to effective counsel. Lazaro said her team discovered the jail had been recording phone calls with one of Richins' attorneys, J. Ramzi Hamady and brought that up with prosecutors on Dec. 11, 2023.
"Did you know this has been happening? Ramzi is clearly an attorney of record in the criminal case and the (Division of Child and Family Services) case so I am concerned," the email said.
Bloodworth said the attorney had not registered for or used an app that prevents calls from attorneys to clients from being recorded, so those calls were recorded just like other calls, Lazaro noted in the motion, saying that Bloodworth admitted to listening to "at least a portion of the calls" since May 2023.
In an email attached to Lazaro's motion on Friday, Bloodworth said the attorney "deliberately refused" to use the app.
"Ramzi knows that in refusing to use the app, the state maintains recordings of their calls. Accordingly, it seems that Ramzi consented to the state maintaining the recordings. Moreover, the state has transparently been providing these recordings in discovery for nearly six months," his email said.
