Beyond The Horizon
The El Chapo Files: El Chapo And The Reply To The Motion For A New Trial (Part 3) (7/6/24)
Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, the notorious Mexican drug lord, has filed a motion for a new trial based on several key arguments.
- Ineffective Assistance of Counsel: El Chapo claims his previous legal team provided inadequate representation. Specifically, he argues that they failed to explore a plea bargain and did not object to government motions regarding classified information
- Juror Misconduct: A significant part of his motion centers on allegations of juror misconduct. An anonymous juror told Vice News that some jurors had accessed media coverage during the trial, which included prejudicial information about Guzmán. This alleged misconduct, according to El Chapo’s defense, compromised the fairness of the trial.
- Extradition Issues: Guzmán also challenges the legality of his extradition from Mexico, arguing that the agreement stipulated he should be tried in Texas or California, not Brooklyn .
- Pretrial Detention Conditions: He contends that the harsh conditions of his pretrial detention at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York, which included perpetual solitary confinement and constant lighting, impaired his ability to participate in his defense.
In this episode, we continue our exploration of the El Chapo Files and the story of one of the most notorious crime bosses in history.
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to contact me:
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source:
El Chapo defense reply motion for new trial - DocumentCloud
- Duration:
- 10m
- Broadcast on:
- 06 Jul 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
What's up everyone and welcome back to the program. In this episode we're picking up where we left off with El Chapo's reply motion for a new trial. 1. Any extra record information of which a juror becomes aware is presumed prejudicial. That is the law presumes prejudice from a jury's exposure to extra record evidence. In that light the government's argument too amounts to an elaborate exercise in burden shifting and extended attempt to turn the applicable presumption on its head. 2. Disabling bias and partiality are similarly presumed when a juror deliberately conceals information to secure a seat or avoid dismissal. That of course is precisely what Guzman's jurors allegedly did in falsely denying exposure to at least the child rape accusations when the court asked them about it during trial. 3. In fact intentionally deceiving the court about exposure to the most reprehensible outside allegations and committing crimes along the way rendered the offending jurors unfit to serve in Guzman's case, burnishing good cause to strike them or declare a mistrial and start afresh. Indeed, an unfit jury, like a faulty reasonable double charge or a racist tribunal constitutes a structural defect in the composition of trial mechanism. Vitating all the jury's findings and mandating reversal, per se, without a showing of more tangible harm. To put it in fine, a fair trial before unfit jurors is another logical impossibility or contradiction in terms. It's simply inconceivable, the notions being mutually exclusive. Tellingly the government's 96 page submission relegates this claim that presumptive jury bias arising from deliberately concealed information is a structural defect triggering automatic reversal to seven words of ipse-dixit. 4. Where extraneous influences is shown, courts apply an objective test focusing on the information's probable effect on a typical or hypothetical average jury. They thus look at the extrinsic material objective nature reversing if it would have led to hypothetical average jury astray. It follows the government blunders in fixating on this jury's subjective behavior and this court's subjective assessment of it applying a faulty standard and asking the wrong question. It's one thing to consider the circumstances surrounding the information's introduction, how it came before the jury, it's another to exhaustively examine every aspect of the trial's conduct and service of injecting a de facto or backdoor harmless error test. The first is permissible, the second prohibited. D. Newlander, the New York appellate case discussed in argument 1, cogently illustrates these points, opposed verdict hearing established that one of Newlander's jurors exchanged during trial text messages with third parties about the trial. As in this case, the jury was instructed numerous times to report any such communications to the court, but the offending juror fell to do so. In sum, the record showed that the jur, like her counterparts here, repeatedly disregarded the court's instructions and actively concealed and was untruthful about her numerous violations. She failed to report her improper communications and then actively concealed and lied about them, during the court's inquiry into the misconduct. An appellate panel reversed Newlander's murder conviction, finding violations of rights that are substantial and fundamental to the fair and impartial administration of a criminal trial. It held in language equally applicable here that due to the jurors, flagrant failure to follow the court's instructions and her concealment of that substantial misconduct defendant through no fault of his own, was denied the opportunity to seek her discharge during trial on the grounds that she was grossly unqualified and/or had engaged in substantial misconduct. Our focus is not on the time of the misconduct's discovery. Instead our focus is the jurors' failure to follow the court's instructions, her failure to report her own misconduct, and her concealment of that misconduct. Evadensing a consciousness that she had engaged in misconduct, which denied defendant the opportunity to pursue a remedy under the dissent's approach, a jurors' flagrant disregard of court rules, and admonitions and her act of concealment of her own misconduct, becomes speculative because the juror was successful in deliberately concealing and withholding the misconduct from the court and defendant until after the verdict. We conclude that there is nothing speculative about the denial of the defendant's substantial right and concrete opportunity to pursue a remedy based on the juror misconduct that is patent on this record. E. Resisting this logic's force, the government seeks principal refuge in a trilogy of cases that are "digressive," "unpersuasive," or both. 1. By the government's own reckoning, U.S. vs. Ghaji prescribes procedures and protocols for handling allegations of juror misconduct that surface during the trial. It says nothing about a defendant's right to a hearing on misconduct allegations emerging after trial, or the prejudice that's presumed when they involve exposure to extraneous information, the issues facing this court. As observed in Laparia decision the government touts, cases concerning pre-verdict accusations of extrinsic, jury influence are thus in opposite. Reference may be inappropriate, or appropriate, for a face-to-face appraisal that's promptly conducted during trial, but not when a court summarily discounts plausible post-trial allegations casting significant doubt on its initial assessment. 2. In U.S. vs. Spano, an unpublished district court ruling from Chicago fares no better. A. Evidence Rule 606, "Fashley barred the news, items proffered there, recounting statements made and incidents that occurred during the jury deliberations." B. More fundamentally, the non-binding opinion conflicts with controlling second-circuit precedent. I. Unlike Ayanello and Moten, seminal authorities the government largely ignores, it didn't apply a presumption of prejudice or force, the prosecution to rebut the presumption. Nor did it consider the article's objective effect on a hypothetical average jury. 2. Instead, the court demanded a reasonable possibility that the article had a prejudicial effect upon the jury's verdict, which it equated with a showing that the evidence was legally insufficient for a rational jury to convict, the standard for a judgment of acquittal. 3. Worse, the opinion leaned heavily on the judge's objective assessment of the actual jury itself. Based on the Spano jurors, actual behavior during the trial, which it proceeded to describe in painstaking detail. 4. Indeed, the opinion rests exclusively on the seven-circuit precedent, notably failing to cite a single case from the second or any other circuit. C. Mimicked almost to the word, Spano forms the crux of, and blueprint for, the government's entire no-prejudice argument, but its reliance is sorely misplaced. Spano squarely contravenes binding second-circuit authority and is wholly unpersuasive. It simply has no application here. 3. For similar reasons, the third case in the government's holy trinity, another trial court opinion from a different circuit, requires little discussion. A. Philadelphia's Fumo, much like Chicago's Spano, not only expressly rejected New York's prejudice, presumption, for extrinsic information exposure, but affirmatively, tasked the defense with proving it, overtly shifting the burden of persuasion. B. Contrary to the government's mischaracterization, the information at issue concerned the defendant's earlier prosecution and ultimate acquittal, not his prior conviction. Fumo's former prosecution occurred almost thirty years ago. His conviction was ultimately overturned on the basis of insufficiency of the evidence, and he remained in office with no repercussion from voters until the current prosecution. C. Perhaps most importantly, only one juror was exposed to a brief summary of that excluded evidence from her co-workers. In market contrast to the vice article, there was no allegation that any of this information was shared with any other member of the jury. F. All the proceedings aside, it bears emphasis that the government previously argued the child rape allegations were so irreparably prejudicial, a bit chiefly to its own witness, of course, that they had to be kept from the jury's consideration at trial. Yet now, with the shoe on the other foot, it reverses course and seeks to sterilize them by playing down their natural impact. What sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, right? Not if you're a federal prosecutor with Joaquin Guzman in your crosshairs, then a double standard is perfectly fine. Anything goes so long as the ends justify the means. G. To cap its quest for an "inapt, harmless error finding," the government brazenly violates rule 606-B1 by persistently inviting the court to consider the exposures a certain effect on the vote and the jury's purported mental process concerning the verdict. Needless to say, the court must decline, but the cardinal sin isn't even the half of it, enticing a federal judge to break the law by ignoring evidentiary rules while slamming your opponent's evidentiary proffer as incompetent and inadmissible as the height of irony, if not something worse. Conclusion, Joaquin Guzman deserves an evidentiary hearing and a potential retrial. At a minimum, his motion cannot properly be denied summarily, at least not without creating a pernicious aura of unfairness, whose ripples will long outlast and far surpass this transient case. If there is no procedural justice for the reputed worst among us, there can be none for our best, or for anybody. This was signed by Mark Furnich, the lawyer for El Chapo, and this was dated on June 14, 2019, and that's going to conclude in its entirety El Chapo's reply motion for a new trial. But have no fear, plenty more where this one came from as we continue to dive deep into the El Chapo files. All of the information that goes with this episode can be found in the description box.