THE MENENDEZ TRIAL: On the Eve of Closing Arguments
NEWARK – Closing arguments in the corruption trial of Sen. Bob Menendez are set to start tomorrow, but a juror’s long-planned vacation is threatening to throw a wrench into the gears of planned jury deliberations.
As lawyers continued to wrestle with the charge to the jury, planned to be delivered by the end of the day today, Judge William Walls said he intends to make good on his pretrial promise to one juror that she would be able to go on vacation starting Friday, Nov. 10.
If jurors are still deliberating on that day, an alternate will take the vacationing juror’s place. However, that will force the entire jury to go all the way back to the beginning and start their deliberations from scratch.
With the jury refusing to sit on Friday and closing arguments to take up at least a full day tomorrow, jurors will have at most four full days to deliberate on the complex case before they are forced to scrap everything and go back to square one.
The impact of Walls’ decision was not immediately clear, but attorneys for the prosecution and defense said they had no objection.
The jury charge, which gives jurors instructions on how to apply the law in the case, is in what Walls called this morning “a stalling process.” He and attorneys for the defense and prosecution are still fine-tuning the language of the document in open court outside the presence of the jury.
And the charge keeps growing longer, from more than 60 pages yesterday to 70 pages by this morning. Walls said it was one of the largest jury charges he’d ever had as a judge.
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