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A Utah developer of video games like "Alvin and the Chipmunks" and "Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2005" asked the Utah Supreme Court on Monday to toss out his criminal convictions for not paying more than 100 employees.
David M. Rushton's lawyer argued that prosecutors wrongly charged him twice for keeping money that didn't belong to him, dragging him back to court while he was trying to make amends.
"It is rooted in fundamental fairness," attorney Joanna Landau said. "If you have crimes that should have been charged together, the state can't do it this way."
Prosecutors, though, contend the cases were fundamentally different. Rushton was charged with failing to pay his employees a total of $1.2 million after being convicted of not paying his taxes in 2009.
Utah is a minor hub for video-game studios with about a dozen companies, including Disney Interactive Studios.
There's no deadline for the Utah Supreme Court to rule in the case, but the justices said that it raises an important legal question about being fair to defendants while still holding people accountable for crimes.
"There is quite a bit at stake," Justice Thomas Lee said.
In Rushton's case, prosecutors said he wasn't paying his taxes or his employees during the same time period, 2007 through 2009.
His lawyers say Rushton thought he paid for his wrongdoing with a six-month jail sentence for tax fraud and racketeering in 2010, only to see new charges and a new jail sentence come down in the wage case the following year.
But authorities said that withholding paychecks is very different from not paying taxes, and it wouldn't be fair to the workers if prosecutors were barred from bringing that case. "These are two different types of conditions with two separate victims," said Marian Decker with the Utah Attorney General's Office.
Rushton did business in a Salt Lake City suburb as Sensory Sweep Studio, which focused on selling games adapted from movies for Nintendo, PlayStation and Xbox game consoles and hand-held devices. Sensory Sweep Studio was known for churning out games quickly, taking a percentage of royalties from moviemakers and others, former employees have said.
Rushton employed as many as 211 people at one point.
Sensory Sweep Studio also developed the video games "Jackass: The Game," ''Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting," ''Justice League Heroes" and "Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects."