Former Democratic New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez’s legal team petitioned Wednesday for the Manhattan federal court to overturn his bribery convictions and authorize a retrial.
The request follows prosecutors’ admissions that jurors accessed tainted evidence on a computer during deliberations, rendering a new trial necessary, according to the defense’s filed documents. Menendez’s attorney Adam Fee claimed that the “serious breach” necessitates a new trial.
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Fee contended in their filing that the flawed exhibits were crucial, representing the sole evidence linking Menendez to the military aid for Egypt. They labeled the government’s blame shift onto the defense as both legally and factually baseless, pointing out the impracticality of reviewing nearly 3,000 exhibits in just a few hours and the reasonable expectation that the government would correctly label the exhibits.
The defense argued that treating this oversight as a waiver could potentially encourage prosecutorial misconduct.
“It had the right to expect that the government had not mislabeled non-introduced and constitutionally barred exhibits as admitted ones. If this were treated as a waiver, that would give parties the incentive to intentionally try to pull a fast one,” the filing said.
Menendez faced conviction in July on 16 counts, including bribery, for allegedly accepting bribes to facilitate U.S. military aid to Egypt. He resigned from the Senate in August and is scheduled for sentencing Jan. 29.
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During the trial, the prosecution claimed Menendez received $100,000 worth of gold bars and $480,000 in cash from three businessmen in New Jersey in exchange for political favors. Earlier this month, prosecutors disclosed that several trial exhibits contained unredacted information that U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein had previously excluded to protect legislative speech under the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause.
The prosecutors argued that despite the error, no further action was required, claiming that defense attorneys had reviewed and approved the documents on the laptop before its use by the jury. They suggested it was unlikely that jurors viewed the flawed exhibits, which they deemed of minimal importance and redundant given the other evidence presented.
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First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.