Superior Court Associate Judge David A. Wiseman set a new deadline yesterday for the CNMI government to file its restitution claim against former governor Benigno R. Fitial in connection with his criminal conviction.<\/p>\n
Wiseman allowed the government to file its request for restitution on or before Oct. 19, 2015. Fitial will then have 10 days to file any objections.<\/p>\n
The judge set the new deadlines in order for Fitial and his counsel, Stephen Nutting, to facilitate further discussions with special prosecutor George L. Hasselback.<\/p>\n
The original deadline for the government to submit its restitution claim was on Sept. 10, 2015.<\/p>\n
Saipan Tribune ran a story last Friday, Oct. 2, about the government\u2019s failure to file a request for restitution by the Sept. 10 deadline. In that article, Hasselback disclosed that he is in talks with Nutting about coming up with the amount of restitution.<\/p>\n
In his order yesterday, Wiseman disclosed that last Friday, Oct. 2, Hasselback and Nutting appeared before his courtroom via a telephone conference to discuss the continuance of certain deadlines in order to give the parties more time to hammer out the amount owed by Fitial in restitution to the Commonwealth.<\/p>\n
Last Aug. 18, Fitial, through Nutting, paid the $6,000 fine and $100 court assessment fee that the court had imposed on him.<\/p>\n
Fitial pleaded guilty in May to misconduct in public office and conspiracy to commit theft of service as part of a plea agreement with the government.<\/p>\n
Wiseman sentenced Fitial to a year in prison. The former governor was supposed to start serving his prison term last July 6, but Gov. Eloy S. Inos commuted the prison term.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Superior Court Associate Judge David A. Wiseman set a new deadline yesterday for the CNMI…<\/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":[26,6722,38,2142],"class_list":["post-211821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-cnmi","tag-last-aug","tag-saipan-tribune","tag-stephen-nutting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211821","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=211821"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211821\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}