Jury selection ready to begin in Snyder’s retrial
The retrial for former Portage Mayor James Snyder, facing a soliciting bribes charge, begins Monday with jury selection. The trial will begin Tuesday and is expected to last through March 18.
The public won’t be able to attend jury selection, as is typically handled, because the potential jurors will be spread out throughout the courtroom, said Jay Schrader, a case manager with the Northern District of Indiana U.S. District Court. Throughout the trial, the public can watch via livestream in the jury assembly room because of COVID-19 precautions, he said.
A jury convicted Snyder, 42, of taking a $13,000 bribe in exchange for contracts to sell five garbage trucks to the city and using a shell company to hide income assets from the IRS while owning back personal and business taxes in 2019. The jury acquitted Snyder for a third count that alleged he took a $12,000 bribe to get a company on Portage’s tow list.
On Nov. 27, 2019, Judge Joseph Van Bokkelen granted a new trial on the soliciting bribes charge. Since then, “several motions, continuances and the COVID-19 pandemic have all contributed to delays in the retrial,” according to court documents.
U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Kennelly, with the Northern District of Illinois, is the third judge assigned to the case following Van Bokkelen and U.S. District Court Chief Judge Theresa
Springmann. Most recently, prosecutors and Snyder’s attorneys argued whether Snyder’s right to a speedy trial have been violated because of delays in a final attempt by Snyder’s attorneys to dismiss the charge. Snyder was originally indicted in November 2016.
Snyder’s attorneys said that pretrial motions are excluded under the Speedy Trial Act, but state the motions to withdraw are “merely ministerial” and therefore should not be excluded under the act, according to court records. Snyder’s attorneys also argued that Van Bokkelen’s 45-day continuance and Springmann’s 30-day extension in the case should be excluded.
Prosecutors argue that two
motions to withdraw and the two motions to continue the retrial were pending and are “automatically excluded.”
Snyder’s attorneys argue that “the proper way” to count the delay is from the date of the 2016 indictment to the present. But, given the trial held in January and February 2019 and a new trial was granted after that, “it would defy logic and common sense” to count from the indictment “and pretend the earlier trial never happened,” according to court documents.
Kennelly wrote that
“nearly all of the delay … has been the result of a global pandemic.”
“That delay cannot rationally be attributed to the prosecution and cannot be viewed as anything other than completely justifiable,” Kennelly wrote. “The two delays Snyder presses — resulting from consideration of his motions related to the government’s seizure of his email and his post-trial motions — are arguably attributed to him, not the government.”
Kennelly denied the motion to dismiss, and set a trial for March 8. Prosecutors anticipate a trial of up to seven days and Snyder’s attorneys anticipate a trial of up to four days, according to court records.