JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — The defense teams for people accused of murdering Jared Bridegan, a St Johns County father of 4, continued their arguments to have the State Attorney’s Office thrown off the case.
The defense for Bridegan’s ex-wife claims there was a violation of attorney client privilege when the government uploaded privileged information to a shared drive.
The tone was very tense as each side made passionate arguments regarding attorney client privilege. Shanna Gardner’s defense team said that the state violated her 6th Amendment rights by uploading potentially privileged information to a shared Nexpoint site. However, the state said they did nothing wrong.
While Shanna Gardner entered the courtroom in shackles, it was the woman charged with prosecuting her who faced most of the scrutiny today. Assistant State Attorney Christina Stifler testified that she followed protocol when she was told potentially privileged information may have been uploaded.
“When she notified me of this, I told her to stop reading," said Stifler, referring to a conversation with an ATF agent, "to have everyone on the team delete the I-Cloud information they were looking at and to take the I-Cloud return back to the secret service so those communications could be removed.”
However, Gardner’s defense team said the damage was already done.
“The... taint person was reckless, was negligent by even asking the prosecutor what to do about a punitively-protected document or set of documents,” said Ronald Sullivan, a member of Gardner's defense team.
Gardner’s defense team wants the entire 4th District of the State Attorney’s Office to be disqualified for the inclusion of privileged information to a shared drive. The state said the inclusion was a mistake, but added none of it was examined.
“They’ve made no showing that their attorney client privilege was violated by anybody," said Alan Mizrahi of the State Attorney's Office, "and I guess the argument from the defense is that defense attorneys should be the ones conducting the search and review of everything because they know what taint is.”
The judge did not make a ruling on the motion to disqualify today, instead she said she will issue a disqualification ruling with regards to both Shanna Gardner and her co-defendant and her second husband Mario Fernandez on May 2nd.