GREAT WHITE: Judge Grants Lawyer Change For Nightclub Fire Defendant

May 27, 2006

The Associated Press is reporting that a judge allowed one of the owners of The Station nightclub to shuffle his defense team on yesterday and said he expected the man to stand trial in the fall for a fire that killed 100 people.

Superior Court Judge Francis J. Darigan Jr. approved Jeff Pine's request to withdraw as attorney for Jeffrey Derderian and agreed to let Boston-based lawyer Anthony Cardinale enter the case.

Pine, a former Rhode Island attorney general, said he was concerned the case would leave him unable to devote enough attention to his other clients and asked to withdraw this week. He had represented Derderian in the three years since the fire.

"This isn't something that happened overnight," Cardinale told reporters outside court yesterday. "We've been working on this over the past month."

Derderian and his brother, Michael, each face 200 counts of involuntary manslaughter for the Feb. 20, 2003 fire at The Station nightclub in West Warwick. The fire, which began when a rock band's pyrotechnics ignited flammable soundproofing foam on the club's walls, killed 100 people and injured more than 200 others.

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