By LARRY NEUMEISTER
NEW YORK (AP) — Bob Menendez asked a judge Wednesday to set aside guilty verdicts that forced his resignation from the U.S. Senate and grant a new bribery trial.
Lawyers for the New Jersey Democrat said in papers filed in Manhattan federal court that a recent revelation by prosecutors that improper evidence was put on a computer used by jurors during deliberations means that a new trial is “unavoidable.”
The 70-year-old Menendez was convicted in July of 16 charges, including bribery, in part based on an allegation that he accepted bribes in exchange for approving military aid to Egypt.
He awaits a Jan. 29 sentencing. Menendez resigned from the Senate in August.
At trial, prosecutors said Menendez accepted gold and cash from three New Jersey businessmen in return for favors.
Earlier this month, prosecutors revealed in a letter to Judge Sidney H. Stein that they had discovered that some factual information that the judge had ruled should be excluded from several trial exhibits was instead inadvertently loaded onto a computer used by jurors to reach their verdict.
In their letter, prosecutors said incorrect versions of nine government exhibits were missing some redactions ordered by Stein to ensure that the exhibits did not violate the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause, which protects speech relating to information shared by legislators.
Prosecutors argued in their letter that no action was necessary in light of the error for several reasons, including that defense lawyers did not object after they inspected documents on that laptop before it was given to jurors.
They also said there was a “reasonable likelihood” that no jurors saw the erroneously redacted versions of the exhibits and that the documents could not have prejudiced the defendants anyway because they were of “secondary relevance and cumulative with abundant properly admitted evidence.”
Lawyers for Menendez, though, said in their submission Wednesday that the exhibits contained the “only evidence in the record” tying Menendez to military aid to Egypt, “an otherwise-missing fact at the very center of the central charge against him.”
“In light of this serious breach, a new trial is unavoidable, despite all the hard work and resources that went into the first one,” they wrote.
The lawyers criticized the government’s attempt to shift blame for the error onto them by saying they viewed the laptop’s contents and approved it.
“That is both factually and legally outrageous,” they wrote. “The defense had only a few hours to review a laptop that contained nearly 3,000 exhibits; it had the right to expect that the government had not mislabeled non-introduced and constitutionally barred exhibits as admitted ones. If this were treated as a waiver, that would give parties the incentive to intentionally try to pull a fast one.”
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