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Businessman goes to prison when agent’s false testimony isn’t corrected December 6, 1998 A grand jury indicted Eugene Kent on 60 counts of mail fraud in 1996 for co-mingling funds in a self-insurance pool his insurance company had set up for a string of South Dakota banks. No money was lost or stolen. All claims were paid. Kent had violated federal rules that say a reserve fund in such an insurance plan must be kept separate from other accounts. A jury thought most of the charges flimsy and acquitted him on 58 of the counts. That didn’t get him off the hook. The penalty on the two remaining counts required a federal judge to sentence him to 27 months in prison. It wasn’t until after he was in prison that Kent learned that a grand jury had erred in bringing the indictments against him in the first place. A federal agent testified falsely before the secret panel that Kent had mailed the checks when in fact, he hadn’t. And since defendants and their lawyers aren’t allowed to be present at grand jury sessions, the false information was never corrected and Kent went to prison. Here’s what happened: The two fraud counts on which he was convicted were based on the fact that he’d received two insurance premium payments through the mail. During the grand jury investigation, FBI Agent Alan Peek had testified he was "able to confirm" that both of the checks had been mailed. But the payments actually had been shipped to him via Federal Express. And prior to 1994, that wasn’t considered mail for purposes of federal crime laws. All of Kent’s transactions had occurred prior to 1994. Kent never raised the issue during trial because he didn’t realize it was an issue. At his trial, in fact, the federal prosecutor never directly asked how the checks were sent. After a year in prison, Kent filed a motion for a new trial based on this newly discovered evidence and the fact that prosecutors and agents had misled juries about it. The government’s response never addressed whether the checks were sent through the mail. It simply argued that Kent’s claims should have been made during his trial. His appeal is now before the 8th United States Court of Appeals and Kent is hoping he can at least get a hearing on his argument. In the meantime, he has been going to school in prison and working as a clerk. He has an exemplary record. He also wonders how a man who never did anything in his life but work hard, lost his business, went to prison and was disgraced in his community because a federal law enforcement officer let bad information go before a grand jury and never bothered to correct it.
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