Judge says Stanford’s lawyers can’t quit case

Alleged Ponzi schemer R. Allen Stanford’s attorneys must defend him at a $7 billion investment fraud trial that will begin next week in Houston federal court, says a U.S. judge who rejected the lawyers’ bid to quit. Bloomberg reports Stanford’s court-appointed attorneys—Ali Fazel, Robert Scardino, John Parras and Ken McGuire—asked to exit his case in a motion filed on Jan. 11, less than two weeks before the start of jury selection. They claimed they hadn’t been given enough time or resources to prepare an adequate defense against what they describe as a complicated financial fraud case. Noting two of the four lawyers have been on the case since November 2010 and the other two since March 2011, Judge David Hittner denied the motion in a two-page order that also rejected the lawyer’s bid for a three-month delay in starting the trial. Stanford, 61, has been imprisoned as a flight risk since he was indicted in June 2009 on charges of defrauding investors through allegedly bogus certificates of deposit at his Antigua-based Stanford International Bank Ltd. Stanford denies all wrongdoing. Read the full story here, and read a column by Houston Chronicle business columnist Loren Steffy here on why he thinks Stanford’s defense is fighting an uphill battle.