Judge rules in favor of prosecutors on motion in Hubbard appeal

State prosecutors from the Alabama Attorney General's Office may soon learn why former House Speaker Mike Hubbard's original lead attorneys abandoned his case in January 2016.

Lee County Circuit Judge Jacob A. Walker agreed to add to the court's record portions of a pretrial hearing held Jan. 8, 2016. During the hearing, two of Hubbard's lead attorneys, Mark White and Augusta Dowd, were given permission to withdraw from his case.

The judge ruled in favor of state prosecutors who asked for the record to be supplemented.

Late last month, prosecutors for the Attorney General's Special Prosecutions Division filed the motion with the Lee County Circuit Court requesting to add the portions of the hearing to the record before Hubbard's case heads to appeal in the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals.

Walker also issued a gag order during that hearing, which prohibited any lawyer on the case from speaking with the press for the remainder of the trial. The gag order lasted until June 2016.

Walker heard White and Dowd's reasons for leaving the case during a closed hearing, which was redacted from the court record. The two lawyers originally filed their motion to withdraw under seal, but it was later published by the Alabama Political Reporter.

Though he ruled in favor of the prosecutors, Walker gave discretion to the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals, which is now hearing Hubbard's appeal, in determining who gets to see the record.

Hubbard's lead defense attorney Bill Baxley filed a response with the Court objecting to the prosecutor's requests.

"The State was correctly barred from attending this hearing," Baxley wrote. "Now the State is attempting to discover the privileged substance of this hearing."

Prosecutors gave no reasons why they wished to see the transcript other than that an order had been filed to supply the full transcript.

White and Dowd served as attorneys for the then-speaker from October 2014, when Hubbard was first indicted on 23 felony ethics charges, until January 2016.

White said he would not go into details about why they were withdrawing from Hubbard's case but said a "conflict of interest" had arisen.

From the then-speaker's indictment in October 2014 to the lawyers' withdrawal in January 2016, Hubbard paid White and Dowd's law firm more than $250,000.

Hubbard's appeals trial may also be delayed again. Lee County Circuit Clerk Mary Roberson filed a motion requesting another time extension of 28 days to allow her office to file the Court Record of Appeal.

The Court of Criminal Appeals granted a separate extension last month, giving the court reporter until Wednesday to submit the record, which includes motions, orders and documents from the entirety of Hubbard's felony ethics trial.

"While this number of filings alone are rare in a criminal case and would warrant an extension of time, many of these filings are Under Seal, which will make preparation of the Clerk's Record even more complex," she wrote. "The Clerk's Record will be voluminous in its transcript and exhibits."

Hubbard was removed from office in June 2016 after being found guilty of 12 felony ethics violations — violations of the same ethics law he himself helped push through the Legislature in December 2010 during his first special legislative session as Speaker.