The Members Trial Transcript Best & Brightest Bad News For Everybody Tainted jury? - You tell us.In a courtroom with a federal judge, a dozen federal attorneys, a group of defendant, and spectators, a nervous juror entered the courtroom, separated from the other jurors, and had the courage to tell the Court that people were using improper influence in the jury room. The Court snapped at this literally shaking woman.With uncommon bravado, she insisted that people were making decisions for other people. Again, the Court's voice rose, saying, "Ah! Ah! I don't want to hear it!" and sent her back into the jury room for deliberations! One might think the lawyers would be leaping. Not a peep from any of the attorneys present. Nearly a dozen defense lawyers, and not one of them raised their voice.
It's edifying to illuminate an undeniably eerie connection between these federally funded defenders:
Every one of the federally-paid defense lawyers continues to be widely known within their legal fraternatiy as lawyers who lose most or all of their assigned cases. It is particularly rare for a federal trial requiring so many defense lawyers to have such an uneven distrubution, so many demonstrably inept lawyers assigned to one set of defendants. No rich mix of mediocrity and excellence here, only a surfeit of the former. That has led to the claim that these federally-paid defense lawyers were not intentionally tolerating such perversion of the jury process, that in fact they did not know how to respond to a court that was tolerating so many different oddities and irregularities in the process, from voir dire right through to the end multiple issues of jury interference and subornment, as direct as any arbiter of law or ethics could ask for. At one point, another juror notified the Court that her Mercedes
Benz had been hit and damaged in the courthouse parking lot, and that she was sure the hit
and run had been committed by one of the defendants, Annette Haley, with Haley's Mercedes
Benz. Never mind that Haley had numerous outside investments; none of the other defendants except the publisher of Who's Who had ever owned a Mercedes. Yet the impression on the jury was clearly significant, more so with a juror carping in every private jury session that a rich defendant's Mercedes had hit and damaged her car, AND had denied it and "Who's going to pay for it?," and.... ... and this does not bode well.
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