....judge really helping w/jurors...
still having difficulties with #30
...any ideas???
keep pushing on ur side
did not understand ur thoughts on statute
but received links.
It's not the kind of message a juror is supposed to be sending to a fellow juror at 10:09 on a Sunday night in the middle of deliberations. Nor is it the kind of thing a defense lawyer expects to find, sent anonymously, in the morning mail. But when the defense lawyer's client is Richard Scrushy, you can bet the issue won't go away quickly.
"Articles usent outstanding!"
A follow-up message, sent about half an hour later, isn't any better:
I can't see anything we miss'd. u?
articles usent outstanding! gov & pastor up s---t creek.
good thing no one likes them anyway. all public officials
r scum; especially this 1. pastor
is reall a piece of work
...they missed before, but we won't
...also, keepworking on 30
... will update u on other meetingz
Then there's the reply:
Great info 4 r friends.
% of prosecution increases dramatically.
Could not find that when I surfed it.
Gov/Pastor GONE....
If you're lost track of the Scrushy story, here's a thumbnail. Richard Scrushy has faced two criminal trials in the last few years. In 2005, he was acquitted of fraud charges over the failure of HealthSouth, the company he ran. The government had better luck in 2006, though, trying Scrushy and former Alabama governor Don Siegelman for corruption relating to campaign donations. The corruption jury -- which included the two late-night E-mailing jurors -- reported twice that it was deadlocked before finally convicting Scrushy and Siegelman last June.
Some E-mails between jurors surfaced soon after the verdict. Armed with those and a juror affidavit ("I was confused between all the evidence and other Internet stuff that some of the jurors brought in and was talking about . . . They were pulling stuff out of files[.]"), Scrushy asked the trial judge for a new trial. The trial judge interviewed the jurors and denied the request in mid-December. Scrushy was sentenced to prison a few weeks ago. (All these links are to the WSJ Law Blog, a great source for Scrushy chronology.)
In the meantime, however, defense counsel got another anonymous envelope in late December, containing the E-mails above. The ensuing motion to reconsider wasn't decided, so the defense has now filed a motion in the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals asking the appellate court to issue subpoenas itself, requiring the production of evidence that would show whether the E-mails are genuine -- including, apparently, the personal computer hard drives belonging to the jurors in question. (The proposed subpoenas themselves aren't attached to the copy of the motion I have, but that's the clear import of the motion.) The government filed a response to the Eleventh Circuit motion last week.
Weird new world
There's a plateful of food for thought here. The idea of a federal court of appeals issuing subpoenas would be provocative enough, but I'm more distracted by the text-message quality of these E-mails, and what it might portend. If you've ever taken a deposition and watched opposing counsel and his client E-mail each other in front of your eyes, you can start to imagine how jurors at opposite ends of a table might have their own conversation even as the group debate swirls around them. When the jurors go home, they can find each other instantly: RU there?
And the slowish handheld connection that even a few months ago might have discouraged jurors from jury-room Internet research is now, if the commercials are right, up to full speed. Those iPhone commercials are pretty incredible. Imagine how much you could find out about Richard Scrushy if you had one of those things in jury deliberations.
(Photo by Dewayne Smith at http://www.flickr.com/photos/dewayne_smith/433951055/; license details there.)
