Last month FOB (friends of blog) Roy Black and Richard Strafer had another win in the Eleventh Circuit in U.S. v. Ignasiak. (Opinion here). Although the case was reversed on Confrontation Clause grounds, the case is of greater interest to me because the Court ordered the unsealing of records regarding the government’s sole expert witness, Dr. Arthur Jordan of Myrtle Beach, S.C. Dr. Jordan testified in the prosecution of Dr. Ignasiak, a retired physician, in a case alleging violations of the controlled substances act, that Dr. Ignasiak was writing prescriptions without legitimate medical purpose.
Now, Dr. Jordan, apparently, is a frequent flyer as an expert witness for the government having been paid around $30,000 for his expert witness services. But here is where the case takes a bizarre twist. Judge Martin writing for the Eleventh Circuit noted that after the verdict, the government disclosed for the first time that Dr. Jordan “engaged in criminal conduct . . . on nine separate occasions, [and] used a counterfeit badge and his United States Marshal credentials to pose as an on-duty U.S. Marshal in order to carry firearms on commercial airplanes while on personal travel.” Amazingly, this series of federal offenses, which the opinion notes resulted in “multiple violations of 18 U.S.C. §§ 912 and 1001 and 49 U.S.C. § 46505,” resulted in pretrial diversion for the good doctor – the federal equivalent of super secret probation.
The question that arises in my mind – what’s the deal? Why would the government permit Dr. Jordan to get off, literally, scot free for having committed, as the Eleventh Circuit notes, multiple violations of federal law – guns on the plane, no less, in the post 9/11 world? Perhaps to preserve the integrity of earlier prosecutions? Dr. Jordan is scheduled to testify in a case that starts here in Georgia later this month. We’ll let you know how that develops.
I’ve found only one other reported case where Dr. Jordan testified, U.S. v. Alerre, 430 F.3d 681 (4th Cir. 2005). If you know of any other cases where Dr. Jordan has testified for the government, send me a post, or an email, and I’ll see if I can obtain the post trial motions that Mr. Black and Mr. Strafer successfully argued on appeal in order to bring the sanitizing light of the courtroom on Dr. Jordan’s practices.