The preliminary hearing for former Carbon County Emergency Operations Director Jason Llewelyn has been continued for another month at the request of defense attorney Greg Law. The hearing was originally set for October 16. It was rescheduled for November 20, and has now been reset for December 21.
Carbon County Attorney Gene Strate said, “That will also give me a chance to see what the federal people are doing. We can both prosecute, but the federal penalties usually are far more severe than the state penalties, so often times we’ll defer to them if we’re basically prosecuting the same case.”
Llewelyn is charged in Seventh District Court with 20 felony counts of misuse of public funds, and was also indicted last week by a Federal Grand Jury on one count of embezzlement of federally-funded program money.
Strate said his office had informed the feds of the case to avoid putting future grants in jeopardy. He also said the FBI helped the Sheriff’s Office with the forensic accounting last summer, and federal prosecutors expressed interest in the case at that time, but they moved slowly.
He said, “It’s not unusual for the feds to contact us and say, we’ve seen this case and we’d like to prosecute this. Do you care if we take it? Technically they don’t have to ask our permission. They can run with their own case.”
Whether the case will be prosecuted locally or by the federal government should be determined before the preliminary hearing. Strate said, “We may find that the feds are charging essentially what we’re charging, so it doesn’t make too much sense to have the federal authorities and the local authorities both prosecuting, so we’re going to sort that out by that time.”
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