Quincino Waide Jr. says prosecutors escalated pressure over 18 months, then indicted him after he repeatedly declined to talk
LEXINGTON, Ky. — A man charged as an accessory in the federal murder-for-hire prosecution of a Lexington street gang asked a judge Monday to throw out the charge, arguing that prosecutors indicted him only because he refused — again and again, over more than a year — to cooperate against his co-defendants.
Quincino Lamont Waide Jr., 26, filed a motion to dismiss in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky, calling his indictment a textbook case of vindictive prosecution. His attorney, Whitney True Lawson, wrote in an accompanying memorandum that the government possessed the same evidence against Waide for more than a year before charging him, and that the only thing that changed during that time was his continued silence…