The legal team for convicted former U.S. Senator Bob Menendez is requesting supplemental briefings in the senator’s corruption case after prosecutors admitted that they mistakenly gave jurors access to some evidence that they shouldn’t have seen.
Last week, prosecutors with the Southern District of New York said in a filing that laptops provided to jurors were loaded with an earlier version of exhibits including information that was supposed to have been redacted. The prosecutors insisted that the evidence was relatively minor in the grand scheme of the case, and that jurors were unlikely to have noticed it regardless amid the mountains of facts presented to them.
But Menendez’s attorneys, Adam Fee and Avi Weitzman, said in a letter to U.S. District Judge that the prosecution is trying to downplay what should be considered a major issue.
“While the government now claims that those documents could not ‘plausibly have affected the decision of any hypothetical average juror’… the government said exactly the opposite at trial when it argued vigorously in favor of the admission of this series of documents,” Fee and Weitzman wrote. “The Court must not merely accept the government’s belated change-of-heart about the supposed lack of importance of the Unredacted Documents.”
The attorneys also insisted that, given that one important error has already been discovered, a complete review of all exhibits presented to the jury should be undertaken.
“Although unmentioned in the government letter, the prosecutors have now acknowledged – again, only after defense counsel’s inquiry – that the prosecutors have not, even after the discovery of this issue, conducted a quality control check of the 3,000 government exhibits that the prosecutors assembled for the jury,” the letter states. “The government said it had ‘not conducted a document-by-document review of each file in our copy of the set of exhibits loaded onto the jury laptop’ because, for undisclosed reasons, they ‘have no reason to think’ any other inadmissible exhibits were provided to the jury. That assumption is bewildering given the errors already acknowledged by the government. A fulsome review of the exhibits is now necessary.”
Menendez’s attorneys are requesting that they be permitted to file opening briefs on the new issue by November 27, with the government responding by December 6.
Menendez, who was accused of trading his influence in Washington and acting on behalf of foreign governments in exchange for cash and gifts, was convicted on all 16 charges in July after a two-month trial.
Menendez requests supplemental briefings