PROMINENT INSURANCE ANALYST ASKS CYNTHIA FELAND SOME TOUGH QUESTIONS
State's Attorney Richard Riha |
Assistant State's Attorney Cynthia Feland |
Assistant State's Attorney Lloyd Suhr |
After a series of articles written by himself (Joe Paduda, nationally prominent analyst), and top author Peter Rousmaniere at Risk and Insurance (Blunting Political Vindictiveness), the top periodical of workman’s compensation, WorkCompCentral started to get a whiff of something rotten in the state of Nodak and started an interesting process of investigation. It seems that the more Burleigh County Assistant State’s Attorney says, the more curiouser and curiouser things get.
Joe Paduda’s article of January 12, 2010 “Fact Checking – North Dakota Style”, begins to put the hot, hot spotlight on the shenanigans that were used to convict former North Dakota Workforce Safety and Insurance CEO Sandy Blunt. It is not a pretty sight. He provides a nice summary of the situation saying:
Turns out that the prosecutor who brought the charges, Cynthia Feland, knew that failing to collect the moving expenses was not a crime - yet she brought charges anyway.
She had in writing that the ND Attorney General advised state auditors in October of 2006 that the exec did not voluntarily leave and thus there was no legal authority to collect. This fact was then put in writing to Feland a year before the trial and she
- added it as a crime just weeks before the trial and
- withheld the memo proving it was all legally done, thereby not giving the defense exculpatory evidence she was legally required to provide."
That's a big assumption, as her comments could have referred to any of the other posts I've written about the Blunt case, but as the possible withholding of exculpatory evidence is the most egregious of the prosecutor's actions, I'll focus on it.
Ms. Feland has now made public statements that authors have been incorrect in their interpretation of the events and situation of the Sandy Blunt case. Will she give a straight answer to Paduda’s latest query?:
Ms Feland made an assumption of her own in her note to Kidd; in fact I have read the relevant parts of the transcript, and searched the entire transcript for any mention of the memo in question. Couldn't find any reference to it anywhere. Now, I'm certainly no attorney, so it's possible I didn't look for the right words. So I've asked Ms Feland to tell me exactly where the memo is mentioned in the transcript, when it was placed into evidence, and/or any other official documentation that it was shared with Blunt before or during the trial.
I'll keep you posted.
For more background check out the Sandy Blunt Persecution section of The Dakota Beacon website.