A federal judge recommended holding as many as three separate trials this year for the remaining parents in the U.S. college admissions scandal.
Magistrate Judge Page Kelley on Friday asked prosecutors and defense attorneys to suggest possible groupings of defendants and proposed that five parents per trial might be best. Married defendants would be tried together.
"How does the government wish to group the defendants?" Kelley asked in court in Boston.
Defense attorneys argue that the parents shouldn't be tried together because they didn't know about one another during the alleged conspiracy. They filed motions arguing the case was improperly indicted and unsuccessfully sought its dismissal.
Prosecutors will reveal the proposed groupings in February when the trial judge, U.S. District Judge Nathaniel Gorton, holds his first hearing in the case this year.
More than 50 people were charged last year in the largest college admissions case ever prosecuted by the Justice Department. Of 36 parents charged, 20 have pleaded guilty and most have already been sentenced. That leaves 15 to try, at least for now; one parent hasn't been extradited from Spain.
Prison sentences have ranged from two weeks for "Desperate Housewives" star Felicity Huffman, who admitted paying $15,000 to boost her daughter's college entrance exam scores by 400 points, to six months for an insurance executive who paid $450,000 to get his kids into the University of Southern California by falsely presenting them as star athletes.
A separate trial, before U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, will be held for former USC associate athletic director Donna Heinel, three coaches and several other defendants who allegedly helped college counselor Rick Singer, the confessed ringmaster of the scam, cheat and bribe the kids' way into elite universities from Yale to Georgetown to Stanford.
Defense attorneys accused the government of burying them in evidence without categorizing the items. Prosecutors have handed over 1.5 million pages of emails, 500,000 documents and 4,000 intercepted phone calls and text messages.
"It's simply impossible for us to put our hands around millions of documents," Martin Weinberg, who represents two accused parents, told the court. "We simply need to know what the government is choosing."
