Prosecutors should keep it simple in retrying Blagojevich


It’s impossible to characterize a hung jury on 23 or 24 criminal counts as anything but a monumental defeat for the prosecution.

By that standard, it might even be said that former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich won when a jury in Chicago could reach a unanimous verdict on only one charge — that he had lied to FBI agents about his intense involvement in campaign fund raising. Through 14 days of deliberations, the jury of six men and six women split their votes. There were reports that votes on the most important charges, involving Blagojevich’s alleged attempts to sell access to the U.S. Senate seat vacated when Barack Obama became president, were 11-1 for conviction.

The New York Times reported that the lone holdout was a woman who simply would not or could not see what Blagojevich did as criminal behavior. She accepted it as politics as usual.

Political observers in the Mahoning Valley cannot be surprised by that. In any group conversation about the conviction of former U.S. Rep. James A. Traficant Jr., someone is bound to voice the everybody-does-it excuse for his crookedness. Perhaps we should take some consolation in knowing that at least one of Blagojevich’s Chicago jurors and many of his defenders, based on news reports, hold that misguided view.

Taking cynicism too far

That’s not only a shame, but it represents a level of complacency and cynicism that is a danger to a functioning democracy.

For every Blagojevich (or Traficant or Rostenkowski or Ney, just to name a few) there are hundreds of politicians at all levels of local, state and federal government who are working conscientiously on behalf of their constituencies. They, to paraphrase a former president, are not thieves.

U.S. prosecutors in Chicago owe it to the people of Illinois and the United States to retry Blagojevich, at least on some of the charges. Trimming the remaining list of 23 charges to a more manageable number might be well advised.

Blagojevich’s first trial went on too long, and the 14 days of deliberations that jurors put themselves through before throwing up their hands indicates that the case as presented was too complex to be manageable.

Jurors are peers — not lawyers — and subjecting them to two months of testimony on 24 charges and then handing them a judge’s instructions of more than 100 pages is no way to win a conviction. The law is complex, but if a prosecutor can’t condense the case in a way that jurors can consider the evidence and follow the law, the prosecutor is going to lose more often than win.

To most ears, the tape recorded evidence against Blagojevich was clear. And, yes, we know that even damning tape recordings aren’t always enough to convict crooked politicians.

Prosecutors must combine and condense and, in the interest of justice, convict. Because despite what one juror may believe, Chicago-style politics isn’t the norm. If it is allowed to become so, everyone but the guilty suffers.

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