WASHINGTON — The federal decide overseeing the felony case towards Roger J. Stone Jr. refused on Thursday to grant him a brand new trial, rejecting
WASHINGTON — The federal decide overseeing the felony case towards Roger J. Stone Jr. refused on Thursday to grant him a brand new trial, rejecting the protection’s argument of juror misconduct that President Trump has additionally repeatedly trumpeted.
Decide Amy Berman Jackson of the US District Courtroom in Washington ordered Mr. Stone to give up to the federal Bureau of Prisons as quickly as he’s notified to take action. She additionally launched him and his attorneys from a gag order she imposed months in the past.
The decide’s resolution seems to finish some of the politically fraught federal felony instances lately. In a last-ditch effort to maintain their consumer out of jail, Mr. Stone’s attorneys had claimed that the jury forewoman had improperly hid a bias towards Mr. Stone, justifying a brand new trial.
The jury convicted Mr. Stone, 67, in November of seven felonies for an try and thwart a congressional inquiry that threatened his longtime pal Mr. Trump, and Decide Jackson sentenced him in February to 40 months in jail.
The case took on broad nationwide significance, pitting a president who condemned the proceedings as unfair towards a federal decide who has defended them in ever stronger phrases. Within the final two and a half weeks of February alone, Mr. Trump attacked the prosecution at the very least 9 instances in Twitter messages or different public statements, accusing the decide, the prosecutors and the jury forewoman of making a “miscarriage of justice.”
The sentencing of Mr. Stone additionally set off an inside disaster on the Justice Division after Lawyer Common William P. Barr intervened to recommend a more lenient sentence for Mr. Stone than prosecutors had initially sought. All four of the prosecutors quit the case — one left the Justice Department entirely — and others began privately expressing fears of political pressures on their work, which is usually afforded a degree of independence.
The judge twice rebuked the president in court, though not always by name. During the sentencing hearing, she simply described comments by a longtime friend of Mr. Stone as “entirely inappropriate.” She added pointedly, “There was nothing, phony, or disgraceful about the investigation or the prosecution.”
During a hearing on the defense’s request for a new trial, she said that the “the president himself has shone a spotlight on the jury” and read aloud one of his tweets attacking the jury forewoman as an example.
She also noted that Tucker Carlson, the Fox News commentator who is close to Mr. Trump, had also tried to stoke public anger about the case and the jurors. Attacking jurors “is completely antithetical to our entire system of justice,” she said, and could provoke someone “to take it out on them personally.”
Prosecutors argued that the defense motion for a new trial was “nothing more than an attempt to fuel its public campaign to undermine the jury’s verdict through a frivolous juror misconduct claim.” But in an unusual move, Judge Jackson held a four-hour hearing on the motion, summoning a dozen jurors back to the courtroom three months after they had rendered a verdict in the case.
Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge who now teaches at Harvard Law School, said she believed the judge was being especially careful because the case had been so high-profile, not because the president was “breathing down her neck.”
“I would have done what she did,” she said.
Mr. Stone’s defense lawyers acknowledged during the hearing that even though they had hired a jury consultant, they failed to scour the social media posts of potential jurors. “That’s on them,” Ms. Gertner said.
Called to the witness stand, the jury forewoman said she had honestly answered all the questions put to her during the jury selection process. On the 20-page written questionnaire filled out by potential jurors, she wrote that she could not recall all her social media posts.
The judge suggested during that hearing that the juror’s posts showed she was critical of the president, not biased against Mr. Stone. “Having an opinion about the president and some or even all of his policies does not mean that she couldn’t fairly or even impartially judge the evidence against Roger Stone,” she said during the hearing.
She also noted that a lawyer for Mr. Stone had a chance to question the woman further during the jury selection process but failed to do so.
In an 81-page opinion accompanying her order, Judge Jackson found that the jury forewoman did not lie on her questionnaire or engage in misconduct during the trial. She also said the defense failed to exercise “diligence” in questioning the juror before she was selected, and found no justification for Mr. Stone’s motion for a new trial.
The president had claimed that the jury forewoman was influenced by her antipathy toward him. But legal experts said that jury pools in the District of Columbia are typically politically liberal and all jurors are expected to put their political views aside and simply evaluate the evidence.
In the case of Paul Manafort — another trial of a former Trump aide that the president also denounced — one juror’s political views meshed closely with Mr. Trump’s. Yet she voted with the rest of the jurors to convict Mr. Manafort, the president’s former campaign chairman, of a financial fraud scheme. During the jury selection process, she kept the fact that she is a Trump supporter to herself because, she said later, “I knew I could be fair and impartial.”