Ghislaine Maxwell conviction in jeopardy

Ghislaine’s Maxwell’s sex-trafficking and conspiracy conviction, little more than a week old, may not be salvageable, legal experts said Thursday after two jurors publicly disclosed past sexual abuse that they might not have included on pretrial questionnaires, reported the Washington Post.

Attorneys for the former longtime paramour of disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein are preparing to seek a new trial on the grounds that Maxwell’s first was fundamentally unfair. A judge will consider the issue later this month.

Defense lawyers made the request Wednesday, based on news articles that quoted one juror saying he used his past to convince others on the jury to believe Maxwell’s accusers, despite some gaps and inconsistencies.

Photos included with some of the articles indicate the juror is a 35-year-old executive assistant in the finance sector who was referred to as Juror No. 50 during anonymous voir dire proceedings.

Maxwell, 60, was found guilty on Dec. 29, after four women testified that she groomed and recruited them as teenagers to give sexualized massages to Epstein, and in some cases groped them herself.

The disclosure that Juror No. 50 was abused as a child would not have automatically disqualified him from serving on Maxwell’s jury. But the defense would have almost certainly used one of its challenges to dismiss him, had he made it past the 30-page, 50-question survey to voir dire, an interview process in open court.

The answers to the questionnaires are sealed, and jurors’ names have not been made public. It is unclear whether Juror No. 50 revealed his history of abuse when asked on the questionnaire if he or a friend or relative had ever “been the victim of sexual harassment, sexual abuse, or sexual assault?” In the transcript of his voir dire, however, he is not asked about his answer to the sexual abuse question, suggesting a disclosure had not been made.

The sexual abuse and sexual assault question on the survey was considered vital to the process of picking a fair panel in a high-profile case that centered on the abuse of underage victims. At issue now is whether Juror No. 50 omitted his own history from the questionnaire despite written and verbal warnings that he was under oath and was instructed to tell the truth.

In the printed packets, jurors were warned — with capital letters and underlined notations — that they were sworn to provide truthful responses. The final page is a declaration requiring a signature to the fact that “under penalty of perjury” all of the above answers were truthful “to the best of my knowledge and belief.”

Former federal prosecutors watching the matter unfold have said U.S. District Judge Alison J. Nathan has tough questions to consider, including whether what has transpired has resulted in a “material prejudice” against Maxwell that can only be cured by a trial do-over.

“This juror has no idea what kind of a chaotic chain reaction he has unleashed,” said Jason P.W. Halperin, a former prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, which handled the investigations of both Maxwell and Epstein prior to Epstein’s death by suicide while awaiting trial in August 2019.

After written motions are filed in the coming weeks and Nathan “very likely” holds a hearing on the matter, “there is now a very real possibility that there will have to be a new trial,” Halperin added.

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Despite prosecutorial misconduct verdict stands according to 1,343 page opinion

Senior Judge Christopher Munch from Arapahoe County, Colorado has denied the death penalty appeal of Sir Mario Owens who was convicted of killing three people in two separate incidents, reported the Denver Post. Munch said Owen's ultimately received a fair trial and was represented well enough by his attorneys. The ruling took nearly a decade to reach, and was a whopping 1,343 pages in length. 

“The court concludes that Owens received a fair trial – one whose result is reliable,” Munch wrote on the last of his . “He also received a fair sentencing hearing — one whose result was constitutionally obtained, justified in law, and is rationally based upon the evidence.”

Owens was first convicted of murder in 2007, in connection with the 2004 shooting death of 20-year-old Gregory Vann at a party in Aurora’s Lowry Park. The following year, in 2008, a different jury convicted Owens in the 2005 killings of Javad Marshall-Fields and Vivian Wolfe, both 22. He was sentenced to death.

At the time of his murder, Marshall-Fields had been scheduled to testify against another suspect in Vann’s death, and prosecutors argued that Marshall-Fields and Wolfe, his fiancée, were killed to silence them. 

Defense attorneys raised numerous concerns about Owens’ convictions, including an allegation of juror misconduct during the Lowry Park trial that Munch denied earlier this year. Munch ruled in his Thursday order, though, that prosecutors improperly withheld evidence during the case — by not disclosing numerous instances in which they provided witnesses money or other benefits.

For instance, prosecutors did not tell Owens’ attorneys that they had promised and later given a car to one key witness. Other witnesses received undisclosed lenience in separate criminal cases facing them. In at least one instance, prosecutors did not reveal that a witness had been present at another shooting while in the witness protection program and preparing to testify in Owens’ case. Prosecutors also withheld information about money that witnesses were paid as informants or in the witness protection program.

Defense attorneys said the evidence could have been used at trial to question the credibility of the witnesses. But, in each instance, Munch concluded that the evidence wasn’t significant enough to overturn the trial. At best, Munch said, the evidence would have been considered “helpful” but not outcome-changing.

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Should Bill Cosby be tried again?

Pennsylvania judge declared a mistrial Saturday in the case against Bill Cosby after a jury was unable to come to a unanimous decision, an inconclusive finale to one of the most high-profile sexual assault cases in years.

Cosby was charged with three counts of aggravated indecent assault in an incident involving former Temple University basketball staffer Andrea Constand at his home in suburban Philadelphia in 2004.

Over the last 10 days, jurors heard the entertainer's defense that the encounter was consensual, while Constand, taking the stand and facing Cosby for the first time, testified that Cosby drugged her and robbed her of the ability to consent.

The split of the jurors remains unknown. Jurors were not polled on the reason for their deadlock or the split among them, and their names remain sealed.

Before dismissing the jurors, O’Neill encouraged them not to speak to reporters about the details of their deliberations, which he said could impact any retrial.

Had he been found guilty, Cosby, 79, would have faced a maximum of 10 years in prison on each count.

Prosecutors said immediately they would retry the case, and Judge Steve T. O’Neill said he would try to schedule a new trial within 120 days.

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Internet creating havoc for judges and jurors

This is a troubling time when it comes to the use of the Internet in the courtroom. Faced with rapidly changing technology, judges are struggling to keep jurors from getting and spreading information about current cases online, reported Stateline. Doing online research on the defendant’s criminal record or consulting Facebook friends on a vote for sentencing might seem acceptable to some jurors, but it violates the oath “to base your verdict solely upon the evidence” as presented in the courtroom.

Internet research and communication in many cases is not malicious: Jurors may be driven by the desire to make sure they understand all the facts and definitions of complex legal terms. “Jurors are instructed in a number of ways as to their supremacy in judging the facts,” said Michael Hoenig, a products liability lawyer and author of several law journal articles on jurors and Internet use, in an email to Stateline. “Such instructions may, despite admonitions against Internet forays, act to ‘empower’ and embolden jurors into ‘searching for the truth’ even outside the courtroom.”

Even though a majority of states now prohibit Internet research or communication by jurors, studies have found that many jurors misconstrue the instructions or simply refuse to limit their Internet use during a trial. In a pilot study of 500 jurors across the country conducted by the National Center for State Courts (NCSC), researchers found that even after jurors had been instructed that they could not tweet, email, use Facebook, or communicate electronically with friends or family members about a case, one-third of respondents either didn’t understand or incorrectly understood what they could and couldn’t do when it came to using the Internet while acting as a juror, reported Stateline.

To read more: http://www.stateline.org/live/details/story?contentId=619920