‘Why wait for guilty verdict before probing juror relationships?’

The U.S. government is questioning why lawyers of former Gov. Timothy P. Villagomez and co-defendants James A. Santos and Joaquina V. Santos waited until the guilty verdict came out before looking into the alleged relationship of some jurors with witnesses in the case.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Eric O’Malley said the U.S. government is not convinced at this point that Villagomez and the Santos couple learned of these juror relationships only after the jury returned the verdict.

“The circumstances and sequence of events described by the defendants is, to say the least, suspicious,” said O’Malley in the U.S. government’s response to the defendants’ motions for a new trial or judgment of acquittal.

The federal jury declared Villagomez and the Santos couple guilty on April 24. Seven days later, the defendants filed several motions, including motions for a judgment of acquittal or a new trial based on allegations that the defense had learned after the verdict that some of the witnesses were related to some of the jurors.

David J. Lujan, lead counsel for Villagomez, stated that after the jury verdict, the defense obtained information that at least five jurors and one alternate juror were related to key government witnesses or a government investigator who assisted the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

“Based on such information, the defense retained a genealogist to determine the familial relations of jurors and government witnesses and to obtain their family trees,” Lujan said.

O’Malley said that, assuming without conceding that the defendants’ genealogical survey is accurate, the U.S. government still takes issue with the defendants’ bald assertion that each juror was aware of their relationship with the witnesses.

“Jurors may come from large and/or disassociated families. It defies reason to charge them with knowing each of their first, second and third cousins—a list which could easily number into the hundreds. There is no legal authority to impute such knowledge, and the court should not adopt one here,” he said.

The prosecutor argued that the question is whether the jurors responded (or remained silent) as they did with dishonest intent.

“The defendants identify no statement or piece of evidence that would suggest that any juror acted with dishonest intent or deliberately concealed any information,” he said.

O’Malley said it takes 12 votes to convict a defendant, but only one vote to hang a jury.

“The fact that all 12 jurors, at least four of whom were related to the defense team, reached a unanimous verdict after just a few hours of deliberation, is testament to the strength of the government’s evidence in this case,” he said.

In addition to waiving objections to specific jurors, the defendants also made a general waiver as to the entire panel, O’Malley said.

“The defendants could have investigated or made inquiries about potential relationships between witnesses and jurors at any point prior to the verdict, or for that matter, several days before trial,” he said.

Yet the three defendants, with at least five attorneys and two investigators, made no inquiries or investigation over the course of a four-week trial, he said.

“The defense counsel’s failure to perform their due diligence has waived their defendants’ right to object,” he added.