Dirty Little Secrets About Juror Contacts in the Don Siegelman Trial

Gossip is like heroin, especially in the South. Behind closed doors, the woman they called Flipper expressed romantic yearnings about the man named Keith. That was too delicious a morsel not to be shared by email among staffers in the U.S. Attorney's office in Alabama. Funny how those silly remarks can turn up later as evidence in a scandal.

Flipper, who got her nickname because she did back-flips for the entertainment of her fellow jurors, was a 26-year-old gymnastics coach and self-described "army brat" named Katie Langer. After the trial, which led to the conviction of Governor Don Siegelman and former HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy, she told the Associated Press how the jurors had bonded with federal marshals and courthouse personnel. "You're 18 jurors [12 regular and six alternates] thrown together with the people who are there to help you out. We really did get a long. By the end we looked forward to going. We were bringing pictures in of our families," she said. She asked one marshal if Keith, a member of the prosecution team, was married.

Less than two weeks after the verdict, she told the Montgomery Advertiser that she would be meeting with federal prosecutors to discuss the judicial process of the trial. "I'm just trying to get some questions answered about the process," she said. "I would like to hear the attorneys' perspective." She said she wanted to go to law school. Evidence suggests that neither Langer nor others thought the rules about inappropriate contact were worth taking seriously.

No word on whether Langer and Keith went out on a date. But Langer's other extracurricular activities are referenced in current issue of Time, which obtained documents from Tamarah T. Grimes, a legal aide in the U.S. Attorney's office in Alabama:

"Grimes' last year also gave DoJ additional e-mails detailing previously undisclosed contacts between prosecutors and members of the Siegelman jury....

"The DoJ conducted its own inquiry into some of Grimes' claims, and wrote a report dismissing them as inconsequential. But the report shows that investigators did not question U.S. marshals or jurors who had allegedly been in touch with the prosecution.

" A key prosecution e-mail describes how jurors repeatedly contacted the government's legal team during the trial to express, among other things, one juror's romantic interest in a member of the prosecution team. 'The jurors kept sending out messages' via U.S. marshals, the e-mail says, identifying a particular juror as 'very interested' in a person who had sat at the prosecution table in court."

The Time article supplements a story I first reported in HuffingtonPost, concerning the strong evidence of jury tampering by Langer and jury foreman Sam Hendrix, the only jurors who spoke freely with the press. But it doesn't capture the ugliness surrounding the deliberations among a jury of seven whites and five blacks. Purported e-mails between Langer and Hendrix, plus the sworn testimony of other jurors, describes a situation completely at odds with the tales of camaraderie that Langer and Hendrix gave to the media. A few examples from Langer:

Sam gov & pastor [i.e. defendant Richard Scrushy] up s--t creek.

good thing no one likes them anyway. all public officials

r scum; especially this 1. pastor is reall a piece of work

...they missed before, but we won't

...also, keep working on [juror number] 30...

will update u on other meeting
Katie

Earlier that same evening she wrote:

Judge really helping with jurors still having difficulties with #30

...any ideas???

Keep pushing on ur side.

Did not understand your thoughts on statute

But received links.
Katie

Those purported messages were sent on Sunday June 25, 2006, three days after Judge Mark Fuller, informed that jurors were deadlocked, sent them back to continue their deliberations. Hendrix and Langer's private, and illegal, contacts had begun almost a month earlier. On May 29, 2006, more than two weeks before the jury was allowed to begin deliberations, Katie wrote to Hendrix:

I agree some of the kounts r

confusing 2 our friends.

Chek text.30/38 still off trac.

Here's how one juror, in a sworn affidavit, describes the jury when it was deadlocked:

"Five for guilty, five for not guilty, and two undecided. The jurors 100% not guilty were [redacted]. Two jurors had hostile words at each other and at this time, the foreman [Hendrix] slipped a note to the judge without our knowledge and told him that we were deadlock.

[Hendrix's private note said that some on the panel were being "lackadaisical."]

"The judge said that he could keep us until the next 4th of July and we needed to have a unanimous decision. Our whole objective changed at that point after nine days, we felt he applied extreme pressure on us to get us to make a unanimous decision. We all decided to agree with whoever was in charge so we could leave and go home. I told everybody I was through deliberating - do whatever you want to do. Just tell me which way I should vote so I can go home. The stake of the two men's lives were totally irrelevant at this point for all of us, and we had a more pressing objective in mind - just to leave and go home for good. We did not vote our conviction. We voted based on the pressure applied by the judge."

As reported here last July, Judge Mark Fuller took a variety of unethical steps to prevent the defendants, or anyone else, from reviewing the evidence of jury tampering. The additional information reported in Time shows how the Justice Department in Washington, in addition to Judge Fuller, refused to examine evidence of illicit juror contacts. Along with the other revelations, it suggests that the rot within the Justice Department runs very, very deep.

Comments

[blueskybigstar]

Important, don't let them get away with it._

http://www.democrats.com/pardon

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/11/13/partisanship/index.html

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/11/13/torture_commission/

[Lagniappe]

Fish rots from the head.

[Gaia Terra7]

Please, everyone this is so very important. Please contact your two Senators and your state Representative and ask them to have Congress investigate this case. If we pull out this one domino the whole criminal racket of this administration will fall. Go to http://www.votesmart.org/ and put in your zip to find out who represents you.

[lovethesinner]

This story is the essence of the Republican party's fall from grace. It shows how Lee Atwater's cynical politics eventually grew to become their style of governance.

If you haven't seen it yet, be sure to catch PBS Frontline "Boogie Man": the Lee Atwater story. It has some great footage of the rise of Karl Rove within the GOP.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/atwater/

Considering the state of the DoJ's reputation at this point, I'm hoping Obama will pick Russ Feingold to be our new Attorney General:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russ_Feingold

I know we don't want to lose his seat in the senate, but I checked and the governor is a Democrat.

[marymansour]

I want our real Governor Don Siegelman in the office that was stolen from him by Karl Rove and his gang of thieves. We have undergone too many years of Bob Riley, who being a right wing Baptist, refuses to let Alabama have the lottery. In the interim, all those surrounding states that allow gambling and lotteries, are raking off the money that could be poured into education and other much needed programs. Time to end the injustice. We still have Lt. Gov. JIm Folsom who was elected along with Siegelman but you never even know he is around with Riley and his cronies sitting on his head.

[bentax645]

Please sign this petition for Don Siegelman. He deserves better than what was dished out to him...An honest man that was Bush and Rove Winked.

Thanks

http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/o/5180/t/3541/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=2297&tag=septcfrtaf

[spillersgirl]

Yes, this is the "South" in a nutshell (I live in Alabama, born and raised. I have lived much of my life embarrassed, in many ways, to be a Southerner). However, the examples at the top of the Dept. of Justice, like Cheney (the sneaky, slimmy, snake that he is) have trickled down to erode the entire system of justice. It's going to take a very long time to clean up the mess left from the Bush administration, a very long time.

I encourage Obama to pardon Siegelman and Scrushy. I believe that Siegelman and Scurshy are still in prison. As I watched the local coverage of this "trial" (Mobile, AL) I knew in my bones that it was an unfair process.

David, thank you for writing this article! I'm sure both gentleman are thankful that you keep this miscarriage in the public forefront.

[Johnniedog]

I hope Obama really helps me with the issues of space travelers. I hope that he opens up all the governmental evidence pertaining to our being visited by other beings from space. After all, the technologies that we currently enjoy are from them. There is not a God, as religion in this country and around the world proclaim. We, our world, was and still is populated by in-breeding with space aliens. This is how we evolved and I think it is about time our government told the truth about it. I have been visited myself and been taken aboard. It is facinating. I see these "unidentified flying objects' returning in the skys, nightly, visiting others. I truely hope Obama is transparent about it as he says he will be in his administration.

[iwishicouldvote]

and I hope you find your prescription again soon... :-)

[kareemachan]

"Fly me to the moon
Let me sing among those stars
Let me see what spring is like
On jupiter and mars...."

[Checquoline]

That's how they do things in the south. Always have. Time to throw some judges and lawyers in jail.

[ErnestineBass]

Then how do you explain what happened to Eliot Spitzer, eh?

[zippywpinhead]

I'd explain it as

He had a REALLY good time for awhile. Then later on, not so much...

[Dannydel]

Two words: 'The South'.

[knowBuddhaU]

Thanks for the link to your earlier article here on HuffPo. That's why I'm a member here, great original journalism.

Rove's signature moves are everywhere in this miscarriage of Justice. His stated goal was to install the Republicans as the only party in power in DC for a generation. His method has been not to govern and earn the trust and favor of the People, but instead to hack our system and force the changes he dictated. Both Bush and McCain have publicly said they wished the president had dictatorial powers.

"Feudalism... in this sense is based on the relation between lords and the peasants who worked their own land and that of the lord. The peasants owed labour service to the lords, who provided military protection and also had extensive police, judicial, and other rights over the peasants. In this view, feudalism came to encompass all aspects of social organization and was characterized as a system that was both oppressive and hierarchical." [Source: Encyclopedia Britannica, Standard Edition. Chicago: 2008.]

It"s all about conversion of our Common Weal into private property in the context of a holy war, aka privatizing the profits while socializing the costs.

The war on terrorism, and it"s engine, the mythical free market (for Democratic hawks like the Clintons, Pelosi, Emmanuel and Lieberman, not just Republicans), are today what the Crusades were during Medieval Europe: a perpetual motion holy war cash machine.

[MasterfullyInept]

The president elects DOJ better bring on plenty of good help.They are going to be so busy detailing and prosecuting the many crimes of the Bush administration for years to come.It would be entertaining if we weren't in such a freaking mess.

[grizhead63]

It will take a decade to clean all this up and cleanout the corrupt judges but it is very possible the Democrats could have several decades. Godisgood, Karma happens.

[donklinestiver]

One of the unbeleivabe things of this past 8 years is how the Department of Justice became dominated controlled and a wing of the Republican Party. We criticized the USSR for show trials how insane to think this country would go that route. On the one occasion where aa Republican criminal was convicted knowwing it was a fall guy and might give up the big guys gets pardoned and there is no national outcry. Had the economy not tanked we might have had another 8 years of the same. Thispost shudd hvea thousand blogs not 11.

[Archie1955]

The investigation has to be thorough and miss nothing. If the evidence points to obstruction then the parties implicated whether or not they're jurors, prosecutors or the judge must face the music and the punishment must fit the crime. The crime here is perverse with far reaching consequences.

[writeaway]

The judge in this case is just as guilty as the prosecution team. He is among those who should go to prison. At the least, the judge should be removed from office and disbarred.
Republicans are corrupt.

[racom]

Great work David, thanks for keeping this story alive. There is unfinished business here and we don't want to let it get lost in all the other garbage rolling in as the crooks are about to leave office. Can repuglicans even spell justice any longer?

[army193]

If Bush attempts to do a pardon...I will bet there will be a constitutional amendment to remove the right of pardons from future Presidents no person is above the law will be the out cry.