Survivor's Hatch Pushes for New Trial

Thu., Mar. 8, 2007 4:12 PM PST by Natalie Finn

For the first time in a while, Richard Hatch's tax season is shaping up to be pretty busy.

The original Survivor champ's attorney argued in a federal appeals court Thursday that his client deserves a new trial on tax-evasion charges because the judge who oversaw the case improperly kept the jury from hearing testimony that broached the subject of cheating on the set of the CBS series.

Hatch was convicted in January 2006 of failing to pay taxes on the $1 million prize he pocketed for winning the first season of Survivor, as well as evading Uncle Sam on $327,000 he earned cohosting a Boston radio show and $28,000 in rent from property he owned.

In May, the 45-year-old Rhode Island resident was sentenced to four years and three months in federal prison. After short stints behind bars in Massachusetts and Oklahoma, Hatch has been cooling his heels since August at the minimum-security Robert F. Kennedy Correctional Center in Morgantown, West Virginia.

Hatch, who maintains that he never paid taxes on his Survivor winnings because he was under the impression that the show's producers would be footing the bill, appealed his conviction in December.

Attorney Michael Minns told a three-judge panel of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that U.S. District Judge Ernest Torres, who presided over Hatch's trial, wrongfully prevented Hatch from voicing allegations that he caught Survivor producers providing food to some of the show's contestants, with an assurance of his silence being the reason they agreed to pay his taxes.

Mimms said that he had informed Torres of Hatch's reason for assuming that he had a deal with the Survivor brain trust, including creator and executive producer Mark Burnett, but that Hatch was not allowed to explain why he had that deal while he was on the stand.

Prosecutors argued in January that Hatch most certainly did have the chance to testify on his own behalf during his trial, but that he and Minns, who never broached the subject of cheating while questioning Hatch, missed their opportunity.

"What the court was unwilling to tolerate was a sideshow concerning whether the producers helped other contestants cheat, divorced from the key defense predicate: that this had all led to the alleged promise," prosecutors wrote in documents filed with the appellate court. "Counsel's failure cannot be transformed into an abuse of discretion by the court."

According to a trial transcript, Torres said that Hatch could present evidence on why he thought he didn't have to pay taxes.

Meanwhile, CBS has denied all allegations of unfair play. The 14th season of the pioneering play-or-be-played series, Survivor: Fiji, premiered Feb. 8, and the network has ordered up at least two more installments.