Convicted former Sen. Bob Menendez and his two co-defendants filed another new trial request after the office of the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York discovered its office again uploaded evidence to the jury that should have been excluded.
This is the second time in the last month the prosecution has discovered an error with evidence on the jury’s laptop. This is Menendez’s third request for a new trial since he was found guilty in July on 16 felony charges.
The former New Jersey senator, who resigned in August, was convicted after a nine-week trial in which he and three co-defendants faced indictments in a federal corruption and bribery case brought by prosecutors in the Southern District of New York. It was the second time in six years that Menendez faced bribery charges.
Menendez and his wife, Nadine Arslanian Menendez, who was also charged, allegedly received, among other things, cash, gold bars and a luxury car in exchange for his using his political influence.
Menendez and his co-defendants — three New Jersey businessmen, Wael Hana, Fred Daibes and Jose Uribe — were part of a bribery scheme.
Hana and Daibes were also found guilty on all counts and filed similar requests for a new trial on Dec. 20. Uribe was charged alongside both Menendezes but entered a guilty plea after making a deal with federal prosecutors.
Menendez’s attorney Adam Fee wrote in his motion for a new trial that this is part of a series of errors made by the government.
“Yet across all of the government’s filings there is not a single sworn statement explaining what actually happened, and only the most generalized account of how these errors were found,” Fee wrote. “Such a pervasive pattern of constitutionally monumental mistakes cannot, in good conscience, be given the back of the hand. It is just too much.”
Fee said the court should not only order a new trial, but also authorize appropriate discovery so that the court, all parties and the public can “understand how and why the integrity of the trial was so badly and irremediably compromised.”
The second time
Judge Sidney Stein denied a new trial request for Menendez, Hana and Daibes after the prosecution on Dec. 13 after it was discovered last month by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan that nine out of over 3,000 evidence exhibits contained material that should have been redacted.
The prosecutors said defense lawyers did not notice the mistake, either, and that the material likely did not affect the verdict.
Judge Stein issued a 78-page ruling stating that there was “no manifest injustice” to the evidence and denied the new trial requests.
Days after the ruling, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan filed that it was discovered on Dec. 11 more evidence, this time long text exchanges, were admitted containing unredacted portions.
The pages of text messages were from September 2019 to January 2022.
