陪审团无法应对布拉哥案判决的复杂性

 

CHICAGO — As the jurors in the corruption case against Rod R. Blagojevich, the former Illinois governor, entered a 25th-floor conference room here, one problem was instantly clear: They were overwhelmed.

The judge had handed them instructions that ran to more than a hundred pages. The verdict sheet was as elaborate as some income tax forms. And many of the 24 counts they were being asked to consider came in multiple parts and were highly technical and interconnected.

elaborate: showed

“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?). These were early hints of the multiple stumbling blocks they would find as they struggled, but failed, over 14 days of deliberations, to reach a verdict on any of the counts but one.

assignment: mission

terminology:

conspiracy:

extortion:

stumble

deliberation:

It also became clear early on that some jurors believed that much of Mr. 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.

crass:

Amounted:

The jury’s conclusion came as a surprise to many since prosecutors had long suggested that their evidence would be overwhelming.

“A lot of it came down to, ‘What was his intent?’ ” Mr. Wlodek said. “You could infer something if you looked at it one way, or not if you looked another.”

Infer:

One juror among the 12 disagreed with the rest over convicting Mr. Blagojevich on counts tied to what prosecutors described as attempts to sell the United States Senate seat once held by President 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.

deliberate/deliberation:

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.

bode:

vow:

holdout:

In the end, the jurors convicted Mr. Blagojevich, a Democrat elected to two terms as governor, on one charge of giving a false statement to federal agents, but reached a conclusion that is 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 here offered a glimpse inside the conference room and a sense of why the foreman, James Matsumoto, a retired video librarian for public television, had on Tuesday morning come to his own certainty that there would be no certainty here.

“It was kind of a bittersweet thing,” Mr. 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 Navy commander among them. They included three blacks, six whites, a Latino, someone with American Indian roots and Mr. 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 Mr. 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 fund-raising 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 claim — 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. “We voted so many times,” Mr. Matsumoto said.

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.

ballot:

Yet the matter of whether Mr. Blagojevich had tried to sell his appointment to fill Mr. Obama’s former Senate seat raised perhaps 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 that this was the prosecution’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 Mr. Blagojevich and his aides spoke of possible jobs, donations, even a White House cabinet appointment he might get after making his Senate choice.

Mr. 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.”

budge:

Another juror, Erik Sarnello, a student from the suburbs, said: “She just didn’t see it, didn’t think they had proven it. She wanted clear-cut evidence.”

The conversations grew passionate, but yelling was rare , jurors said. No one recalled tears. There were light moments of bonding, even amid the disagreement.

Mr. Matsumoto referred to some fellow jurors by nicknames. Mr. Sarnello celebrated his 21st birthday during deliberations. And Mr. Wlodek presented the group with a picture his 5-year-old daughter had drawn of Mr. Blagojevich and the courtroom as she imagined it.

In the end, Mr. Matsumoto sent a note to the judge, his fifth over 14 days: A verdict was in, such as it was.

By Wednesday, the group’s views were so vigorously sought after that a court official advised the 12 to call 911 if reporters grew too persistent.

From his living room, the foreman 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.

But Mr. Wlodek also had an observation Mr. Blagojevich may wish to consider.

“There seemed to be a lot of grandstanding, a lot of laughter on his side of the room,” he said of the former governor’s courtroom demeanor. “It kind of made me wonder whether he was taking this seriously.”