Attorney Jerome Ballarotto said that Giorgianni has demonstrated he can be trusted not to flee.
EWING — Joseph “JoJo” Giorgianni has been wearing a GPS monitoring bracelet for more than a year, and it’s high time the device be taken off, Giorgianni’s lawyer argues in court papers.
Attorney Jerome Ballarotto said that, in light of his client’s voluntary trips to and from a prison facility in Massachusetts for a court-ordered evaluation, Giorgianni has demonstrated he can be trusted not to flee.“It’s absurd to argue he’s a flight risk,” Ballarotto said today. “He was just a couple of hours from the Canadian border.”
Ballarotto said that since Giorgianni poses no risk to the community and has established a track record of appearing in court when he is needed, the government should take off the monitoring device.
“I think he deserves a break,” Ballarotto said.
Giorgianni was arrested alongside Trenton Mayor Tony Mack in September 2012, as part of an alleged scheme to accept bribe money for a city development project, and has been under electronic monitoring ever since. The device allows federal Pre-Trial Services workers to monitor his location.
But Giorgianni’s health problems, which often keep him in a wheelchair when he is being moved around outside his Ewing home, include leg swelling that is exacerbated by the ankle bracelet, Ballarotto wrote.
“The electronic monitoring device often causes chafing and redness in the area of the device,” Ballarotto wrote in his Nov. 7 filing. “Sores that may develop by wearing the device twenty-four hours a day continue to put Defendant Joseph Giorgianni at risk for an infection.”
In the filing, Ballarotto said he is not asking that Giorgianni be excused from home confinement.
Giorgianni has been under house arrest and on electronic monitoring since the day of his arrest as a condition of his $250,000 bail. In that same period of time, Mack has made multiple trips out of state, including to Washington, D.C., for inauguration festivities and the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
Earlier this year, Giorgianni briefly had three free hours to spend outside the home each day until that was rescinded after an alleged outburst in court. Giorgianni is currently allowed to leave his home for court, meetings with his lawyer, and religious services. He has been ordered to stay away from his namesake steak shop in North Trenton, but ran afoul of the U.S. Attorney’s Office this summer when he picked up a sandwich in the area of the steak shop. In August, a judge made the no-go areas more clear, to the point of drawing up a map, Ballarotto said.
Giorgianni’s indictment on alleged corruption stems from the FBI’s corruption investigation of Mack. Seeing him as a go-between with the ability to influence the mayor, federal cooperating witnesses allegedly gave him cash as part of the FBI’s sting operation. The informants said they were seeking the mayor’s help with a parking garage development project in downtown Trenton.
Mack, Giorgianni and Mack’s brother Ralphiel all pleaded not guilty following their indictment in December. The lawyers for all three men asked Judge Michael A. Shipp earlier this month for a severance in the case, which would give Giorgianni a separate trial. They also asked for much of the voluminous wiretap evidence in the case to be thrown out.
Government attorneys had a deadline of today to file their response. As of press time the document was not available, Shipp ruled today that two of the government’s previously-sealed applications to wiretap the phones of Giorgianni and others in 2011 can be part of that response, and therefore also public.
Giorgianni also faces charges in a separate prescription drug dealing case where the Macks are not implicated. Ballarotto has said those charges are why Giorgianni’s bail is higher than the $150,000 for Tony and Ralphiel Mack.
Contact Alex Zdan at azdan@njtimes.com or (609) 989-5705.
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