DOJ Drops All Money-Laundering Charges Against Miami Lawyer
Federal prosecutors asked Wednesday to dismiss the drug money-laundering case against Miami criminal defense lawyer Ben Kuehne.
“I have had throughout a deep and abiding belief that things would turn out well in the end,” Kuehne said in a statement provided to the Miami Herald.
“However, I did not know the end result would come about by decision of the Department of Justice,” he said.
Kuehne was indicted in February of last year over six legal opinion letters for defense lawyer Roy Black (for which Kuehne earned $197,300) saying Black could legally accept $3.7 million in fees and $1.3 million in expenses from convicted Columbia drug kingpin Fabio Ochoa Vasquez.
Prosecutors said they dismissed the test case against Kuehne after a federal judge threw out a key money-laundering charge against him and the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of appeals upheld that decision. U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke of Miami ruled Kuehne could not be prosecuted on the charge because of a 1988 exemption in the money-laundering statute for lawyers’ legal fees.
“Kuehne’s case came to symbolize the legal struggle between a defendant’s right to a lawyer and the U.S. government’s power to limit it,” the Miami Herald wrote. “Hundreds of lawyers—including a former chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court—rallied behind him, donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to his legal defense.”
