Prosecutors have dropped computer crimes charges against a social media model charged with stabbing her boyfriend to death and her parents.
Authorities had charged Courtney Clenney and her parents, Kim and Deborah Clenney, with illegally accessing Christian Obumseli’s laptop after he was stabbed to death in the condo he shared with Courtney Clenney in April 2022, as CrimeOnline reported. The model fled to Hawaii after the murder.
Clenney, also known as Courtney Tailor, is facing a second degree murder charge in Obumseli’s murder.
But defense attorneys claimed that the computer was a shared device between the couple and that the parents were authorized to access it while Clenney is in jail.
In June, Judge Laura Cruz excluded a key piece of evidence in the case: text messages the parents shared in a group chat while they tried to guess the password of the device, WTVJ reported. The Clenneys’ attorney was part of those text conversations, and the judge ruled that prosecutors violated attorney-client privilege by accessing the conversations.
Cruz ruled that prosecutors had taken i “entirely upon themselves to unilaterally conclude the (crime-fraud) exception applied.” That exception in attorney-client privilege comes if the communications prove the attorneys and clients engaged in crime or fraud. Only the court can make that determination, she said.
On Thursday, prosecutors announced in court they were no longer pursuing the case.
Courtney Clenney’s attorneys said after court that they are hoping the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office recuses itself from the murder trial.
“That’s really disheartening that the state would take these tactics and invade the defense camp as the judge found. They invaded the attorney-client privilege, work product, they read our texts, our strategy about this case,” Frank Prieto said Thursday. “They can’t and they should not remain on this case.”
In its own statement, the State Attorney’s Office noted that Cruz had “found that prosecutors were unaware that attorney Frank Prieto represented Kim and Deborah Clenney since a retainer agreement hiring him was only produced after their arrest.”
“A reading of the group texts by police investigators appeared to indicate the commission of a crime,” the statement said. “This information, supplied to prosecutors, resulted in the criminal charge. Since Judge Cruz’s ruling that the information contained in all the text messages were covered by attorney-client privilege excluding them from use in the criminal case, the charge against each was nolle prossed.”
Prosecutors charge that Clenney, now 28, was the instigator of domestic violence against Obumseli. Defense attorneys claim the opposite and say she killed him in self defense.
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