Dr. Tariq Mahmood faces a May trial on health care fraud charges.
Criminal defense lawyers for Dr. Tariq Mahmood, the former hospital-chain owner indicted for Medicare fraud, won a couple court victories this week in preparation for his May federal trial.
They also demonstrated heightened vigilance about jurors’ potential proclivities toward tax issues.
On one front, his team successfully argued that the prosecution’s expert witnesses should be barred from explaining how Medicare is funded with tax dollars. That fact is common knowledge, the lawyers wrote in a court filing.
“Such an explanation,” they said, “is very likely to appeal to sympathies and prejudices of jurors who pay taxes.”
The Mahmood team, headed by flamboyant Houston trial attorney Dan Cogdell, also won approval to bar a prosecution witness – a medical officer for a Medicare auditing firm – from testifying. The team challenged the reliability of his methods for determining the sample size that turned up allegedly improper billings, among other issues.
