Local & State Headlines

Lee lawyer investigated

• Last week GBI agents served Ramon Fajardo with search warrants seeking billing records, authorities said.

J.D. Sumner & Susan McCord

PALMYRA — A Lee County attorney at the center of a state investigation involving billing discrepancies for defending indigent clients was referenced in a public order three years ago for overcharging the federal court system, documents show.

GBI agents executed search warrants at the home and office of Ramon Fajardo last week, seeking billing records pertaining to Fajardo’s participation in the state’s indigent defense system, said Dougherty District Attorney Ken Hodges, who has been appointed by the state attorney general to oversee the investigation.

Russ Willard, spokesperson for Attorney General Thurbert Baker, said last week that a complaint was filed with the attorney general’s office by the Georgia Public Defender Standards Council after concerns arose that Fajardo may have been overcharging the state.

That complaint sparked the search that resulted in documents and the hard drives to Fajardo’s computers being sent to the GBI’s electronics forensics unit in Atlanta, Hodges said.

The Herald learned Monday of a public order issued by the chief judge of the U.S. District Court’s Middle District of Georgia in 2005 that chastised Fajardo for overbilling on four cases to which he was assigned as a public defender before the court.

In the order, Lawson says that Fajardo billed the government nearly $7,000 for 19 hours of work preparing motions on the four cases he was involved with.

The motions, according to the order, were filed in connection with four federal cases out of the court’s Thomasville and Valdosta districts and were nearly identical to ones he had previously drafted and shouldn’t have taken nearly that long to prepare, Lawson wrote.

“But while it may have required several hours work to draft and assemble the Federal Motions the first time they were filed, neither can it be said that the time required to prepare and file each subsequent set of Federal Motions was anything approaching nineteen hours,” Lawson wrote.

Of the 19 hours Fajardo billed the court, Lawson granted only four for the work filing the motions, the order says.

In addition to that incident, Lawson hinted that additional billing discrepancies may have occurred in other cases within the federal court district.

“Based on discussions with other judges of this district, the Court is satisfied that Mr. Fajardo has filed the same set of Federal Motions in cases other than the four discussed here and has sought to be compensated for 19 hours work in each case,” Lawson wrote.

Rather than discussing those cases more, Lawson “declines to go back and reopen that can of worms at this time.”

No criminal charges have been levied against Fajardo in connection with the state or federal billing inquiries.

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