Konstantinos Diamantis’ second corruption trial will begin with jury selection on Dec. 4, a federal judge said Thursday.
Diamantis, Gov. Ned Lamont’s former deputy budget director, has been accused of soliciting and accepting $95,000 in bribes from a Bristol eye doctor who was being audited for suspected Medicaid fraud.
U.S. District Judge Stephan Underhill also set a date for Diamantis to be sentenced as part of a previous corruption trial in which he was convicted on 21 counts related to soliciting bribes from school construction contractors in Connecticut.
That sentencing hearing is now set to take place in the middle of September, nearly a year after jurors found Diamantis guilty of bribery, extortion, conspiracy and lying to federal investigators.
Federal prosecutors and Diamantis’ defense attorney, Norm Pattis, both agreed to delay the next trial to December due to scheduling conflicts and concerns over the amount of media attention that the case has received.
Pattis and the assistant U.S. attorneys who are leading the case told Underhill that they would like to have some time lapse between Diamantis being criminally sentenced in the first case and selecting a jury for his second trial because of the publicity both cases have received in Connecticut.
“The government is sensitive for the potential need or desire for a period of time to pass between sentencing and trial, given the significant media attention the cases have received to date,” assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan Francis told the judge.
Francis and the other prosecutors on the conference call also said that they would prefer to delay the second trial because they intend to push forward other criminal cases this spring and summer.
The federal prosecutors initially agreed to postpone the sentencing from the first trial until after the second trial, which had been scheduled to begin this week.
Those plans were set aside, however, when Diamantis arrived in federal court earlier this month for a hearing and abandoned a plan to change his plea to guilty.
Diamantis’ second trial is unlikely to take much time to complete. The prosecutors and Pattis, Diamantis’ defense attorney, estimated it should take less than a week.
But that trial is likely to draw significant attention, given that a former state Democratic lawmaker and several former members of Lamont’s administration could be called to testify.
Diamantis is accused of pressuring several public officials, including Deidre Gifford, the former commissioner of the state Department of Social Services, to get a state Medicaid audit cancelled.
Prosecutors also alleged that, in return for that pressure campaign, Diamantis accepted $95,000 in bribes from Helen Zervas, an optometrist, and her fiancé, former state Democratic lawmaker Christopher Ziogas.
Both Zervas and Ziogas have both pleaded guilty to bribing Diamantis.
If he proceeds to trial in December, Diamantis will face five criminal counts of extortion, bribery, conspiracy, tax fraud and making false statements.
Diamantis has pleaded not guilty to those charges.
