State: Self’s motion to dismiss charges ‘is untimely’
FLORENCE — Seven weeks before Lauderdale County Circuit Court Judge Gil Self is scheduled to go to trial, the State Attorney General’s Office filed on Friday a 21-page response to Self’s pretrial motions.
The state contends that in reference to Self’s seeking the charges to be dismissed that the motion “is untimely.”
“He had more than two months to challenge the indictment between then and being served with the indictment at his arrest on Jan. 29, 2024,” the state noted. “… His arguments are essentially the same arguments he has made throughout these proceedings.”
The state laid out each of the 16 counts of use of public office for personal gain.
• Count 1 refers to Self’s purchase of a couch for his home;
• Count 2 charges him with writing Hobby Lobby a check for framing his son’s college diploma;
• Count 3 refers to Self hiring his son, who also happened to be the only paid law clerk Self has ever had;
• Count 4 refers to Self paying himself more than $2,000 for conference tuition, fees and a hotel room he did not register for;
• Count 5 refers to Self paying about $3,700 for a beach condo for himself and his son, paying for mileage to and from the beach, per diem each day he was on vacation, a hotel room in Montgomery for the drive down to the beach, and a hotel room for a weekend in Birmingham that overlapped with his beach condo on the way back up;
• Count 6 refers to Self paying himself approximately $3,500 for five nights at the Grand Hotel, two of which were supposed to be for the 2021 Alabama Judicial Conference. The state notes that Self did not go to the hotel or the conference;
• Count 7 refers to Self paying himself to do an online Judicial College Seminar on Ethics, which he did not register or attend;
• Count 8 refers to the food and alcohol expenditures he and his wife incurred on a ski trip to Montana;
• Count 9 refers to the food and alcohol purchases he and his wife incurred during a bike trip across Ohio;
• Count 10 refers to Self paying himself and causing himself to be paid by the Lauderdale County Community Corrections program to attend a fourday conference in Nashville, then leave after two days and go to Michigan, paying for his Uber to the airport so that he could leave the conference early and then paying himself a per diem out of the presiding judge’s account for all four days, including those in Michigan;
• Count 11 is about paying himself about a year in advance to attend a judicial mindfulness retreat in Duck Key, Florida, which he never registered for or attended;
• Count 12 is about paying himself to go to Mackinac Island and never going;
• Count 13 is about paying himself for per diem and mileage out of the presiding judge’s account and then requesting the state comptroller to pay him per diem and mileage for the same trip;
• Count 14 refers to Self requesting money from the Lauderdale Community Corrections program for attending a conference, which he did not attend. The state contends that Self put the check in his bank account after he had already cancelled his hotel room and then paid himself to go to Birmingham out of the presiding judge’s account.
• Count 15 charges Self with paying for alcohol on the public’s dime, “which the Examiners of Public Accounts had cautioned him about in a previous audit.”
• Count 16 charges him with paying for his personal eyeglasses with public funds.
“None of these are borderline permissible,” the state noted in Friday’s filing. “None of them rationally can be interpreted as supporting local court operations.”
Self’s trial remains scheduled to begin on Oct. 20.
