Sounds like it to me.
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Five months after a jury convicted Sen. Bob Menendez of corruption-related charges that ended his political career, federal prosecutors have admitted to a series of errors that could upend the verdicts.
The missteps have handed Menendez's attorneys just the kind of opening they'd been looking for, and they have already requested a new trial. If they get their way, Menendez could beat federal charges once again a remarkable prospect given the stash of gold bars and piles of cash used as evidence against him.
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"The prosecution gift-wrapped them one here," said Jonathan Kravis, a former federal prosecutor who is now a partner at Munger, Tolles & Olson.
Menendez's conviction on 16 counts this summer led to his resignation from the Senate, and he is expected to be sentenced in January.
In several surprise legal filings since mid-November, prosecutors from the Southern District of New York revealed they had inadvertently given the jury access to evidence a judge ruled jurors should not see.
The evidence at issue was loaded onto a laptop the jury was given during its deliberations. Prosecutors have said it's "vanishingly unlikely" and unreasonable to think any juror actually poured through all the documents on the laptop and came across the tainted material, which amounts to scraps of unredacted text messages amid 3,000 often lengthy documents.
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The biggest problem for prosecutors is that some of the material was evidence that U.S. District Court Judge Sidney Stein ruled could not be shown to jurors without treading on a form of immunity given to members of Congress by the Constitution's "speech or debate" clause.
Good grief!Quote:
Speech or debate privileges are mostly impenetrable in investigations relating to the official duties of lawmakers, their aides or other congressional officials.
"If you breach it, the only remedy is to dismiss the indictment or give this guy a new trial," said Stan Brand, a former counsel to the House of Representatives who argued speech or debate issues before the Supreme Court.
LINKQuote:
He said the issue in the Menendez case of whether a jury having access to this kind of protected material is grounds for a mistrial is "totally novel."
Stein rejected a previous long shot attempt to have all the corruption convictions against him thrown out, but the judge has yet to address the laptop issues.