Following his recent media blitz, Texas financier and SEC defendant R. Allen Stanford attempted to “surrender” to the U.S. Marshal’s office in Houston yesterday, but had no luck.
Bloomberg reports that according to Stanford’s lawyer, Dick DeGuerin, Stanford told the marshals he had come “to surrender, if you’ve got a warrant’’ and was simply told by marshals that there was no such warrant and they couldn’t take him.
Why did Stanford go through this exercise? Deguerin told Bloomberg “I wanted to establish beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is not a flight risk. He wants to face this. He’s not going to hide, and there’s no need to come after him. They’re already following him wherever he goes, so I’m calling them out on it.” He added that he’s never before “escorted a client to the U.S. Marshal’s office to surrender before an indictment was handed down. He said he hoped the gesture would persuade the government to allow Stanford to self-surrender if he is criminally charged, rather than be arrested and led into the courthouse in handcuffs.”
A stunt by Stanford? PR for potential jurors?
If they find wrong-doing, he will still do the perp walk and they will still plead for no bail. The SEC and DOJ are not going to take a soft approach is the current climate.