Back in May, I put up a post discussing some of the political shenanigans leading up to the conviction of Don Siegelman, the former Democratic Governor of Alabama who appears to have been the target of a political prosecution by the Department of Justice.
Time Magazine (via Firedoglake) is reporting that the jurors in that case were communicating with the prosecution during deliberations and that those communications were not disclosed to the judge or the defense.
A key prosecution e-mail describes how jurors repeatedly contacted the government’s legal team during the trial to express, among other things, one juror’s romantic interest in a member of the prosecution team. “The jurors kept sending out messages” via U.S. marshals, the e-mail says, identifying a particular juror as “very interested” in a person who had sat at the prosecution table in court. The same juror was later described reaching out to members of the prosecution team for personal advice about her career and educational plans.
The article discusses other irregularities and improprieties in the trial, but this one seems open and shut. You just flat don’t communicate with jurors when they are deliberating. And, if through no fault of your own, a juror communicates to you; you tell everyone immediately.
Leave a Reply