By Lynn Brezosky
The Associated Press
McALLEN, Texas — A charter bus company owner is to serve five years probation for fleet mismanagement violations, though the sentencing judge questioned the nature of the charges which didn’t accuse the owner of responsibility for a bus explosion that killed 23 people during a hurricane evacuation.
“My concern is that if it were not for the accident that was not part of this charge, the government would never have investigated this,” U.S. District Judge Ricardo Hinojosa said Wednesday.
Nonetheless, Hinojosa ordered that James Maples, a former NFL player who owned Global Limo, spend the first six months of his probation in a halfway house and the second six months under home confinement with electronic monitoring. He also barred Maples from working in the business — he has spent the last several months as a sales consultant for a bus company.
The misdemeanor charges were unrelated to the 2005 explosion and the judge had instructed prosecutors against mentioning it to jurors during the trial.
Maples was acquitted Oct. 3 of the most serious charge of conspiring to falsify driver time logs so drivers could work longer than federal law allows. He was convicted on two lesser allegations of poorly managing his fleet and not requiring drivers to fill out vehicle inspection reports.
Hinojosa said he was troubled that prosecutors couldn’t recall another case in which the government brought such management-related charges against a motor carrier to federal district court. He noted that testimony showed inspectors had given Global Limo a satisfactory rating the year before the accident.
Besides probation, Maples was fined $10,000 and his defunct company was fined $100,000.
Hinojosa said he wanted the sentence to reflect the “ongoing, nonchalant fashion in the way Mr. Maples ran the tour business.”
“There were corners cut. There were steps that were taken, always pushing the cart a little bit,” Hinojosa said. “It is no way to run a business to endanger the trust or endanger the individuals who put their trust in a carrier.”
Prosecutors referred questions to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Houston, which could not be reached for comment late Wednesday. They have said they felt hampered in writing the indictment because the bus fire near Dallas in September 2005 occurred when federal regulations had been lifted to free up buses for hurricane evacuations.
The bus that exploded had been carrying nursing home patients fleeing Hurricane Rita. Most of the patients were too frail to escape the burning bus. Federal investigators found that an overheated wheel bearing ignited a fire that caused oxygen canisters to explode.
Maples declined to make a comment to the judge before sentencing — his attorney explained that Maples still faces lawsuits over the explosion.
Robert Luke, a Houston-based lawyer for several victims’ families, said attorneys have rejected an $11 million settlement offered in June by Global Limo and BusBank, which contracted the bus.
Civil lawsuits naming Motor Coach Industries, the Chicago-based manufacturer of the bus, as well as Global Limo, BusBank, the driver of the bus and the nursing home have been in consolidated in a state court in McAllen and will likely be tried in the fall of 2007.