Inmate’s plot ends in longer sentence

Prisoner filed bogus liens against trial judge in retaliation

A inmate who filed multimillion dollar property liens against a South Texas judge got additional time tacked onto his to 50-year drug sentence Wednesday in Houston.

Noel Exinia, 50, who has spent the past 15 years in federal prison, admitted in March he’d used bogus liens to retaliate against the judge who presided over his drug smuggling case. However, Exinia’s lawyer told his new judge Wednesday that Exinia’s goal was not to harm the trial judge. The liens were merely a last-ditch effort to get the court’s attention.

Defense attorney Richard Kuniansky made this argument, following technical glitches and a brief resetting, at a video hearing. Exinia appeared by videolink from the Houston federal detention facility, dressed in a standardissue olive green uniform. His lawyer, the judge and the prosecutor were all in separate remote locations with other participants patched in by phone.

Exinia agreed to forgo an in-person hearing and agreed to proceed under the COVID-19 era setup.

His lawyer argued that Exinia’s claim — in the fake filings — that U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen

owed him hundreds of millions of dollars was preposterous. His client filed the fraudulent paperwork, which he’d obtained from jailhouse lawyers, in an attempt to get Hanen to reconsider his sentence.

The Cameron County man had been serving at a federal facility in Pennsylvania and he was afraid he’d never see his family again, his lawyer said.

“As crazy as this scheme is, he’s under the belief that this is a way that he can get his sentence revisited,” Kuniansky said, explaining his client’s mindset at the time. “I agree it’s totally ridiculous. He’s in there grasping at straws. He’s desperate. He knows he may be in there the rest of his life.”

Exinia apologized for any harm, saying, “I thought this was a way out. Every time I would send a motion to the court they’d always said it was denied … I tried everything.”

Chief U.S. District Judge Lee H. Rosenthal said she didn’t buy the notion that Exinia had been duped by fellow inmates.

“He may be many things, Mr. Kuniansky, but I don’t find him a stupid man,” Rosenthal said. “His success in running a complicated and successful drug conspiracy testified to his skills, his intelligence and his competence. I’m finding it difficult to square … The fact that he genuinely understood this was a legitimate way of getting a different result simply defies belief.”

She sentenced him to an additional 30 months in prison — 18 months will be consecutive to his drug sentence and one year year will run concurrently.

Exinia was sentenced to prison in 2006 after he pleaded guilty to using his La Feria-based trucking business to transport marijuana and cocaine from Mexico to the United States. He represented himself at trial and later attempted to retract his plea, saying he’d had poor representation and was not in good mental health at trial as a result of being held in solitary confinement, according to reports.

From November 2014 to January 2015, while serving at a federal penitentiary in Canaan, Pa., Exinia filed a series of liens against Hanen’s personal and real property. Civil court records and his federal indictment also indicate he filed similar liens against property belonging to Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles Lewis, who prosecuted the Brownsville drug case. Those charges were dropped by the federal prosecutor at his sentencing Wednesday.

Despite the hassle, neither official suffered any financial harm, according to Kuniansky.

The fake liens are considered a Sovereign Citizen filing, a do-ityouself legal tactic used by inmates and some in the free world; it holds that that the U.S. government is not legitimate and thus citizens can render justice within their own common law system.

In what the Justice Department calls a “nonsensical rant,” Exinia wrote that the government does not have the authority or jurisdiction to prosecute him and he questioned whether his plea deal was voluntary. He cited the 1961 Hague convention and indicated the government shouldn’t have presumed he was the person with his name.