Jason White (from left), Noel Chua and Stephen Reba, Atlanta. (Photo: John Disney/ALM)

A former Camden County physician whose murder conviction was dismissed after 11 years in prison has sued two Georgia attorneys and a Florida lawyer, claiming they conspired to frame him and strip him of $2 million in assets. 

Noel Chua—the first physician in Georgia to face murder charges for improperly prescribing medications that led to someone's death—claims in a federal lawsuit filed Sept. 18 that Atlanta attorneys Michael Lambros and Andrew Ekonomou, and Florida lawyer Steve Berry worked in tandem with county prosecutors and a former judge to violate Chua's civil rights and secure his wrongful conviction for murder. 

Neither the prosecutors nor the former judge—who presided over Chua's murder trial but retired in 2012 while facing ethics charges by the state judicial watchdog agency—were named as defendants in the suit.

Last year, Ekonomou joined President Donald Trump's personal legal team, working on the president's behalf during special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe. Ekonomou has worked as senior counsel at the American Center for Law and Justice, founded by Trump attorney Jay Sekulow. 

Berry, a lawyer who practiced in St. Marys from 1980-2010, is also a best-selling author of historical conspiracy thrillers. He lives in St. Augustine.

Lambros, who serves as a special assistant district attorney for prosecutors across Georgia, has for more than a decade made a specialty of filing civil racketeering forfeiture actions against businesses that feature coin-operated game machines. The civil forfeiture suits often accompany criminal gambling charges against small business owners, many of them immigrants. The forfeitures have faced multiple challenges in the state's appellate courts. 

Lambros, Berry and Berry's attorney couldn't be reached for comment. But Ekonomou said he hasn't seen the suit and had no comment. "I don't speak to reporters," he said.

Chua was a popular and widely liked physician in Camden County in coastal Georgia when he was charged in 2006 with felony murder and multiple counts of illegally providing prescription drugs "outside the scope of a legitimate medical practice." The charges stemmed from the death of Jamie Carter—Chua's 20-year-old housemate, intern and sometime patient—who was found dead in Chua's home after overdosing on a cocktail of prescription narcotics.

Chua's lawsuit alleges that, while he was awaiting trial and serving time in prison, Lambros converted most of the physician's assets to legal fees and paid himself out of Chua's estate. Lambros was appointed as receiver for Chua's estate after Brunswick Circuit District Attorney Stephen Kelley, now a Brunswick Superior Court judge, filed a civil racketeering forfeiture action against Chua following his indictment. Ekonomou, then Lambros' law partner, was counsel to the receiver, the suit alleges.

During the first year after Chua was indicted, the firm then known as Lambros, Atkinson & Ekonomou siphoned nearly $100,000 in fees from Chua's estate, the suit alleges. When Chua was released from prison in 2017, only $14,274 remained of his assets.

The firm, also a defendant, later became the Lambros Firm. Ekonomou, Lambros' brother-in-law, remains of counsel.

Chua's assets—an oceanfront home with a pool, a medical building, four residential rental properties, an insurance policy and several bank accounts—were drained even though there was never an evidentiary hearing on any aspect of the civil forfeiture action, other than Lambros' requests for compensation and liquidation, the lawsuit claims.

Ekonomou subsequently became an assistant district attorney in the Brunswick Circuit and, after Chua was convicted, fought for nearly three years on behalf of the Brunswick DA to keep secret a memo that Berry sent Kelley prior to Chua's trial. Meanwhile, Lambros continued to collect fees as the receiver for Chua's dwindling estate, the lawsuit contends.

In that secret memo, Berry, then a county commissioner in the Brunswick Circuit, rated 80 members of the jury pool for Chua's trial and recommended strikes to the DA. "Personally, I would avoid blacks on this jury," Berry wrote. "I understand you have some constitutional concerns there that have to be kept in mind, but try to avoid them."

Chua's attorney, Decatur lawyer Stephen Reba, said Berry's memo raises serious questions about whether prosecutors flouted the U.S. Supreme Court's 1986 decision in Batson v. Kentucky.

Batson established that the use of preemptory challenges to keep African Americans off juries because of their race violates the U.S. Constitution's Equal Protection Clause. Chua is a Filipino American.

The memo, which The Daily Report obtained in 2017, was unsigned, but it included Berry's contact information. Brunswick Circuit Superior Court Judge Anthony Harrison overturned Chua's felony murder conviction. Chua then pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter in return for a sentence of "time served." Chua also pleaded guilty to maintaining a house for use of drugs. Johnson also dropped the 11-year-old civil racketeering suit and returned any unspent funds. 

Reba said the suit "is really about the overreach of quasi-governmental actors … coming in and essentially just robbing [Chua] blind of $2 million without cause, putting him in prison for a decade and then conspiring, post-conviction, to try to cover themselves." 

The civil forfeiture action that drained away Chua's assets was compounded by the Batson violations and Ekonomou's fight on behalf of the Brunswick Circuit DA to "intentionally withholding the [Berry] memo because they knew the conviction was wrongful."