Jurors say they are stuck in bribery trial of Illinois Sen. Emil Jones III
The federal jury considering the bribery case against Illinois Sen. Emil Jones III signaled a potential deadlock Wednesday over two of the three charges that have loomed over the South Side Democrat for two and a half years.
The latest corruption trial at the Dirksen Federal Courthouse isn’t over yet. U.S. District Judge Andrea Wood has said she plans to urge the jury of five men and seven women to continue their deliberations Thursday morning.
Still, the news followed a day of otherwise total silence from jurors who have deliberated for 18 hours since Monday afternoon. It came in one of three notes sent by jurors at the end of their latest day of talks.
“At this point, it doesn’t look like the jury can reach a unanimous agreement on Counts 1 and 3,” one of their notes read. “Is there any assistance that can be provided?”
Prosecutors have leveled three criminal charges against Jones. Count 1 is the substantive bribery charge. Count 2 accuses the senator of using an email account to facilitate bribery. And Count 3 accuses him of lying to the FBI.
The feds say Jones agreed to protect red-light camera executive Omar Maani in the Illinois Senate in exchange for $5,000 and a job for a former intern of Jones. The senator had filed a bill in February 2019 that could have prompted a statewide study of red-light cameras, and Maani saw it as bad for business.
Maani was also secretly working for the FBI at the time, having been caught delivering illegal “benefits” to public officials across the suburbs.
The jury heard from a half-dozen witnesses across seven days of testimony this month, including from Maani and Jones himself. While jurors were silent most of the day Wednesday, they sent additional notes this week putting their deliberations in context.
In an additional note Wednesday evening, jurors asked whether they must agree that Jones accepted the $5,000 and the job for his former intern. Or, they wrote, “Is it enough that one of the things of value were accepted?”
Earlier, on Tuesday, the jury asked whether it was possible for Jones to back out of a bribe after agreeing to accept it. Lawyers in the case spent half the day debating that question Tuesday. Eventually, Wood told the jury that the crime is committed if all of its elements are “satisfied at that point in time.”
If the jury considering the case against Jones fails to deliver a verdict, it would be the second panel to do so in seven months while considering a federal corruption case in Chicago.
Already, the Jones jury has deliberated longer than the panel that failed to deliver a verdict in last summer’s trial of ex-AT&T Illinois President Paul La Schiazza.
The former utility head was accused of bribing former Illinois House Speaker Michael J. Madigan, who was convicted in a partial verdict in February.
Jurors in La Schiazza’s case deliberated for 10 hours in September before signaling their frustration to U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman. The judge asked them to keep trying, but they gave in after 14 ½ hours.
Still, La Schiazza’s not in the clear, and Jones wouldn’t be either. La Schiazza faces trial all over again in June.
During closing arguments in Jones’ case earlier this week, prosecutors told the jury that Jones lied on the witness stand when he said he’d felt uncomfortable with Maani, when he claimed that saying “you can raise me five grand” means raising between $0 and $5,000, and when he dismissed his own incriminating comments on secret FBI recordings as just the way he talks.
“There was no written confession here,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Prashant Kolluri told the jury. “You didn’t need one. The recordings are the written confession, right? Everything’s there. It’s there for you.”
But defense attorney Victor Henderson argued the senator had been set up. He questioned why the FBI never sent Maani with an envelope full of cash to offer Jones. And he accused prosecutors of the “Dirksen Two Step.”
“They knew he wasn’t dirty,” Henderson insisted. “They knew he wouldn’t take it.”