{"id":184195,"date":"2014-11-06T17:23:06","date_gmt":"2014-11-06T07:23:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/?p=184195"},"modified":"2014-11-06T17:23:06","modified_gmt":"2014-11-06T07:23:06","slug":"judge-wiseman-dismisses-criminal-charges-vs-fitial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/judge-wiseman-dismisses-criminal-charges-vs-fitial\/","title":{"rendered":"Judge Wiseman dismisses criminal charges vs Fitial"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Superior Court Associate Judge David A. Wiseman dismissed today, Thursday, the criminal charges against former governor Benigno R. Fitial. <\/p>\n<p>Wiseman ruled that the Office of the Public Auditor that brought the charges lacks the authority to initiate criminal action against Fitial, who is now a private citizen, and that the attorney general retains prosecutorial authority over such an action when the defendant is not currently in office.<\/p>\n<p>Wiseman dismissed the case without prejudice, meaning the case can be re-filed in the future.<\/p>\n<p>The judge said should the AG find it necessary to file criminal charges against the former governor upon reasonable belief he has committed a crime while in office, it is free to do so, as it retained exclusive prosecutorial power once Fitial resigned from office.<\/p>\n<p>More details to follow. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Superior Court Associate Judge David A. Wiseman dismissed today, Thursday, the criminal charges against former&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[68,1326,50],"class_list":["post-184195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-ag","tag-judge-wiseman","tag-power"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184195\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}