What You Need to Know
- Ex-broker Keith Todd Ashley allegedly murdered one of the clients he was stealing from and tried to stage it as a suicide, police and prosecutors said.
- Ashley was found guilty of wire fraud, mail fraud, bank fraud and a gun charge in October 2022.
- A separate state-level murder case is pending in Dallas County, and its future is unclear.
A Texas attorney says a state-level case against his ex-broker client for allegedly murdering a client may not go forward.
“I believe the outcome of the appeal will determine if the state moves forward,” said James P. Whalen, owner and founding partner of Whalen Law Office in Frisco, Texas.
Whalen recently filed a notice of appeal for the life sentence handed down to his client for multiple federal crimes.
The client, Keith Todd Ashley – who worked as a broker for Parkland Securities from 2002 to 2020 – was indicted by a federal grand jury on Nov. 12, 2020. He was later found guilty by a jury of wire fraud, mail fraud, carrying a firearm in relation to a crime of violence and bank fraud in October 2022.
The former broker was charged with murdering a client in 2020 while he was already under investigation for a federal Ponzi scheme.
Ashley was sentenced to life in federal prison early this month for federal crimes including a gun charge tied to the client’s death. The sentence was handed down by U.S. District Judge Amos L. Mazzant.
But Whalen argues that details from Ashley’s related state-level murder case were stretched by the Justice Department to enhance the allegations that eventually led to the life sentence.
Judicial authorities “overreached” in their prosecution of Ashley by slapping him with a life sentence for the federal case that did not include a charge of murder, unlike the separate state-level case, he told ThinkAdvisor in a phone interview.
There was, Whalen further argued, no crime that Ashley was charged with that would normally result in a life sentence.
The Justice Department did not charge Ashley with murder. The separate state-level murder case against him was initiated by the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office. A trial has yet to begin, according to online court records at the District Court of Dallas County’s website.
It wasn’t clear on Monday when a trial was expected to begin. A spokesperson for the District Attorney didn’t immediately respond to a request comment.