Janet Goodson, president of Goodson Farms, was sentenced three months in prison for filing false tax returns from 2001 to 2004. Goodson Farms is one of Hillsborough County’s largest strawberry farms and the site of a popular produce market. Court records alleged that Goodson failed to report cash sales of peppers on tax returns.

Charged in Tampa’s federal court, Goodson faced up to 24 months in prison. She received a more lenient sentence because she cooperated in a federal investigation related to fraudulent federal crop insurance payments last year. In that case, prosecutors charged Goodson Farms, and D&K Farms in Plant City with lying about damaged crops to obtain more than $1 million in federal crop insurance payments. (more…)

Christopher Powell was sentenced this week to life in prison after being convicted in the Tampa federal court of felony drug charges relating to the possession and distribution of marijuana and cocaine. Powell, from Pinellas County, was also convicted of being a felon in possession of a firearm.

Powell was indicted last year and charged with conspiracy to distribute the drug, along with two other men. He was found guilty after a federal jury trial in Tampa last December. (more…)

Maybe it’s just a sign of the nation’s current economic woes but it seems that the Tampa Bay newspapers report more government fraud cases every week. This week, a Clearwater convenience store clerk pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Tampa to charges of food stamp fraud.

Naushad Shahabuddin ran the Quick Check Food Mart in Clearwater. He was accused of buying hundreds of thousands of dollars of food stamps from store customers at a discount. Twenty-seven of his former customers have also been arrested in the scheme. (more…)

The national media spotlight has shone brightly recently on the problem of over-prescribing pain medications. A California court has charged three people, including two physicians, with conspiring to over-medicate celebrity Anna Nicole Smith before her death several years ago. A similar case has now been filed in the Tampa Bay area.

83-year-old St. Petersburg doctor John Rew was arrested this week and charged in a Tampa federal court with overprescribing oxycodone, hydrocodone and Xanax. (more…)

Yosdan Castellanos of Orlando was sentenced earlier this month in Tampa federal court for running a Medicare fraud scheme. Castellanos was sentenced to more than five years in prison and must pay $738,000 in restitution to the U.S. government.

Castellanos was originally charged with ten counts of health care fraud and ten counts of making false or fraudulent claims but ultimately pleaded guilty to one count of health care fraud. He owned a company called Florida Med Services, which purportedly provided medical equipment (primarily ventilators) to Medicare beneficiaries. The company had a phony storefront in Tampa. (more…)

A public insurance adjuster in Hernando County, north of Tampa, was sentenced to four months in jail and nine years probation last week for forging his client’s name on a settlement check, giving her a bad check in return and solicitation to commit insurance fraud.

Karim Hayavi obtained a $270,000 settlement from Citizens Property Insurance for his client, Ruth Pullen. Pullen’s house was being threatened by a sinkhole. Both Hayavi and Pullen were required to sign the check.

Hayavi and Pullen previously reached an agreement which would the adjuster 15 percent of whatever amount was collected from the insurance company. In this case, it was about $40,000. Hayavi gave Pullen a check for $230,000 and kept the insurance company’s check for $270,000. (more…)

Hillsborough County FL prosecutors dropped DUI-manslaughter charges this week in a case that killed a Gibsonton, FL motorcyclist in November 2007.  Jeffrey Freson of Deltona, FL had been facing up to 15 years in prison if convicted.

Freson was charged after his pickup truck collided with a motorcycle driven by Joshua Motsinger on State Road 60 near Providence Road on the night of Nov. 27, 2007. Motsinger died of his injuries.

Prosecutors said that there ultimately wasn’t enough evidence to prove Freson was drunk at the time of the collision or that he caused the crash. The case was set for trial in two weeks. (more…)

Joshua Altersberger pleaded guilty to first degree murder at the Polk County Courthouse in Bartow, FL late last week. Prosecutors had previously filed notice of intent to seek the death penalty and the case was set for trial later this month. A motion to suppress Altersberger’s statement to police following his arrest, including his consent to the testing of his hands for gunshot residue, were denied last week prior to the plea. (more…)

A rare federal death penalty case was tried in Tampa this month. The case involved an execution-style murder in a Bartow drug house. Bartow is the county seat of Polk County, just east of Tampa and Hillsborough County.

The U.S. government passed the federal death penalty statute 20 years ago. Only three people have been executed as a result of a federal death sentence since then, including Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. The State of Florida executed three people in the last eight months. Fifty-five people are on federal death row. There are 394 inmates on Florida’s death row. (more…)

The Adam Walsh Act was signed into law in 2006 and was largely concerned with the expansion of the National Sex Offender Registry and the grant of additional resources for Internet Crimes Against Children Task Forces. One minor piece of the legislation though has caused federal defense attorneys and their clients are great deal of trouble for the last two and a half years. A provision in the law restricting access to evidence of child pornography significantly undermines a defendant’s right to due process and a fair trial. (more…)