Judge denies Menendez’s efforts to get new trial following evidence errors

A federal judge has rejected former Senator Bob Menendez’s attempt to receive a new corruption trial due to a series of evidence errors committed by the prosecution, saying that the errors in question were relatively minor and that no grave injustice was done to Menendez or his co-defendants.

In a series of filings beginning in November, prosecutors admitted that they had mistakenly provided jurors with laptops including certain pieces of evidence that had been ordered to be removed from the proceedings. Prosecutors said that the evidence only represented a tiny portion of their overall case, and that it was unlikely any jurors even noticed the mistakenly included texts and documents.

Menendez, who was convicted in July in a wide-ranging bribery case involving influence-peddling and gold bars, argued that the mistakes cast doubt on the outcome of the entire case and demanded that U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein order a new trial. Stein, in a 14-page opinion today, firmly disagreed.

“Because the defendants have waived any objection to the improperly redacted contents of the laptop and its submission to the jury and because the defendants were not prejudiced by the improperly redacted material, defendants’ supplemental motions for a new trial are denied,” Stein wrote.

Stein’s opinion hinged on two key points. First, he noted, Menendez’s defense team was given time during the trial to review the laptops and evidence presented to jurors, and never raised any issue with them (nor did they protest against the relatively short timeframe they were given for the review). And second, Stein said he agreed with prosecutors that the evidence in question was not a key part of the case – as Menendez’s lawyers attempted to argue – and may have gone entirely unnoticed by the jury.

“It is extraordinarily unlikely that the jury was even aware of the miniscule amount of extra-record material on the laptop. The extra-record material was a few phrases buried in thousands of exhibits and many thousands of pages of evidence,” Stein wrote. “Even in the infinitesimal chance that the jury happened upon this evidence, there is similarly a miniscule likelihood that the jury would have understood it, much less attribute the significance to these exhibits that the defendants now do.”

The ruling means that the sentencing for Menendez and two of his co-defendants, Fred Daibes and Wael Hana, will go ahead as scheduled for January 29. (The trial for another key co-defendant, Menendez’s wife Nadine, is set to begin in two weeks.)

Prosecutors are seeking a 15-year prison sentence for Menendez, who was one of New Jersey’s most powerful figures until his indictment in September 2023 – the second time major federal charges had been brought against the senator, who survived a previous corruption case in 2017. After his conviction, Menendez resigned from the Senate seat he had held for more than 18 years; it’s now held by Andy Kim, whose Senate campaign was built around opposing the corruption that he said Menendez represented.