As jurors in the corruption case against Rod Blagojevich, the former Illinois governor, entered a 25th-floor conference room, one problem was instantly clear: They were overwhelmed. The judge had handed them instructions that ran to more than 100 pages. The verdict sheet was as elaborate as some income tax forms. And many of the 24 counts they were asked to consider came in multiple parts and were highly technical and interconnected. "It was like, 'Here's a manual, go fly the space shuttle,' " Steve Wlodek, one of the jurors, said Wednesday.
Jurors said it took them several days just to figure out how to begin to break down their assignment into manageable tasks — not to mention how to understand the legal terminology (what exactly is conspiracy to commit extortion?) — early hints at the multiple stumbling blocks they would find as they struggled, but failed, over 14 days of deliberations, to reach a verdict on all but one of the counts. It also became clear early on that some jurors believed that much of Blagojevich's crass political talk — captured in hours of secretly recorded phone calls — amounted to dreamy thoughts of what he might gain, not criminal demands.
The jury's conclusion came as a surprise to many because prosecutors had long suggested that their evidence would be overwhelming."A lot of it came down to, "What was his intent?" Wlodek said. "You could infer something if you looked at it one way, or not if you looked another." One juror among the 12 disagreed with the rest over convicting Blagojevich on counts tied to what prosecutors described as attempts to sell the Senate seat once held by President Barack Obama, but the jurors were more evenly split over other counts against the former governor and had, at various times during their private deliberations, cast votes with all sorts of margins.
That, legal experts said, does not bode well for prosecutors, who have vowed to retry their case. In cases involving hung juries, a lone holdout may not be a sign of a significant problem for prosecutors, while a more equally divided jury could be. In the end, the jurors convicted Blagojevich, a Democrat elected to two terms as governor, on one charge of giving a false statement to federal agents but reached a conclusion rare in criminal cases: that they could not agree on the 23 other counts, including the most serious ones. Interviews with a handful of the jurors offered a glimpse inside the conference room and a sense of why James Matsumoto, the foreman and a retired video librarian for public television, had Tuesday morning come to his own certainty that there would be no certainty here.
"It was kind of a bittersweet thing," Matsumoto said, in the living room of his house on this city's Northwest Side, "relief that the trial is over, but frustration that we didn't accomplish what we set out to do." The jury, which had been meeting since the trial's start in June, was a quiet, sober bunch — a math teacher, a former Marine, a college student, a retired mail carrier and a retired naval commander among them. They included three blacks, six whites, a Latino, someone with American Indian roots and Matsumoto, who is Asian-American.After initial frustration and confusion upon arriving in the deliberation room with little sense of what to do next, the jurors laid out a plan.
On large sheets of paper, they wrote down crimes Blagojevich was accused of committing and taped each one on the walls around the room. On the sheets: a claim that he had sought political contributions in exchange for legislation to help a local pediatric hospital; another that he had sought a political fundraising event in exchange for state financing for a school; another that he had sought payments for a law that would benefit the horse racing industry; and so on. From time to time, after talking about each count — and often replaying audiotapes of the former governor's secretly recorded phone calls connected to it — the jurors would take a vote by secret ballot and write the margin on a Post-it note attached to the appropriate sheet. This was repeated over and again, often for the same criminal count.
The margins ranged vastly and changed as the talks went on. Sometimes, he said, the vote was 7 to 5, then 5 to 7, then 9 to 3. Yet the matter of whether Blagojevich had tried to sell his appointment to fill Obama's former Senate seat raised the most attention, and took up, jurors said, at least five days of the deliberations. After initially being more evenly split on that question, 11 jurors repeatedly cast votes in favor of convicting on the charges connected to it — charges that included bribery, conspiracy, extortion conspiracy and racketeering. Many in the group felt this was the pro-secution's strongest case and the set of counts that the jury was most likely to agree on.
But one juror, a woman whom other jurors declined to identify, saying they wanted to respect her privacy, never budged in her opposition to convicting on the counts. She was unmoved by recorded calls in which Blagojevich and his aides spoke of possible jobs, donations, even a White House Cabinet appointment he might get after making his Senate choice. Wlodek described her stance as "very noble," adding: "She did not see it as a violation of any laws. It was politics. It was more of conversations of what-ifs." Matsumoto said he believed that a retrial was "owed to the people," but he and other jurors also seemed to have some advice for prosecutors: Streamline the charges, drop some, pick your shots.
No comments:
Post a Comment