(Thumbnail Image: The Chicago Tribune)
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BLAGOJEVICH: “I want to thank the men and women of this jury for what they came up with. ... They threw everything they could at me-- 24 charges that I’ve said from the beginning are false, and the jury agreed that the government did not prove its case.” (The Guardian)
After three weeks of deliberations, an 11-member jury issued former Governor Rod Blagojevich a guilty verdict on one count of lying to a federal agent. 23 other counts against him resulted in mistrial, and prosecutors immediately announced plans to retry the case.
A reporter? for Honolulu’s KITV calls the trial “disappointing,” giving a behind-the scenes look at jury deliberations with the perspective of jury foreman James Matsumoto.
“This foreman says while there were single hold-outs on some of the counts, it was a mixed verdict on several of the counts. Matsumoto says the jury never stopped deliberating. He said there were some jurors that wanted to keep going. But at the end, they all realized it was going to be pointless. ... Matsumoto says some jurors could not get past the lack of a smoking gun. Matsumoto says the government's strongest evidence was the sale of the Senate seat.”
But in considering prospects for a re-trial, CBS’ Harry Smith wonders whether Blagojevich is prosecutable, asking correspondent Jan Crawford -- is he just guilty of being a blow-hard?
JAN CRAWFORD: “I think the prosecution really failed to prove, as we saw yesterday, there was this great sense of overconfidence by the prosecution because they never were able to show that he was a criminal. That he was just a bad governor. They thought that the jurors were going to be shocked by these tapes. We saw how profane he was, but what they really showed was that he was this profane, loud-mouthed guy. ... I mean the defense really kept it simple: follow the money. And they were never able to show that that money went into his pocket.”
On Chicago’s WBBM, legal analyst Irv Millers suggests the fact Blagojevich didn’t testify helped the defense, and that the chances are quote --”less than zero” he would testify in a re-trial.
IRV MILLER: “They don’t want to go down this road again that they went down yesterday. The U.S. attorney’s office is not used to losing, and this was a loss for the United States attorney’s office. ... I think the chances of the governor testifying are less than zero. There was a reason why he didn’t testify, and that’s because he would have helped the government more than he helped himself.”
Blagojevich depleted his $2.8 million campaign fund on his defense, so taxpayers might have to pick up the tab for a retrial, which could run as high as an estimated $25-30 million. But is it worth it? An editorial for the Chicago Sun-Times says - you bet.
“This is a governor who hid in a bathroom to avoid talking business with his budget director. ... only by prosecuting public corruption to the fullest extent of the law, retrials and all, can Illinois one day hope to arrive in that happy land of honest government.”
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