Tainted jury member leads to mistrial
Judge: ‘Too dangerous to continue’ after jury member breaks courthouse rules
Loose lips sunk the ship that was Antonio Accurso’s fraud and municipal corruption trial in Laval.
A juror’s inability to respect two cardinal rules brought a sudden and unexpected end to the trial of the 66-year-old construction entrepreneur whose notoriety made him the poster boy of municipal corruption in Quebec.
The trial ended abruptly in a mistrial on Friday.
Prosecutor Richard Rougeau was minutes away from making his closing arguments when Superior Court Justice James Brunton was handed a note from one of the jurors on the panel. The woman referred to in court only as Juror No. 6 informed Brunton that earlier in the week a distant relative who is also her landlord told her something about one of the Crown’s most important witnesses that was not part of the evidence heard in the trial that began on Oct. 19.
Accurso still faces five charges alleging he was part of a system of collusion organized by former Laval mayor Gilles Vaillancourt in which city contracts were awarded to a large group of companies before being put up for tender.
The system ran between 1996 and 2010 and the colluding companies were left to arrange fake bids.
The companies also agreed to kickback two per cent of the value of the contracts to Vaillancourt and other Laval city officials.
When the jury was selected, Brunton gave the jurors a standard set of instructions to follow throughout the trial. One is that jurors are not supposed to discuss the trial with anyone while it is going on. Judges often use conversations with relatives as an example of something to avoid if those relatives bring up the trial. Another more easily defined instruction forbids jurors from discussing the trial with fellow jurors before deliberation begins.
As Brunton was informed of Friday morning, Juror No. 6 did not respect either instruction. The woman was called before Brunton to explain what was behind her note. She said that earlier in the week, her landlord told her he previously knew Marc Gendron, a man Vaillancourt assigned to collect the kickback payments, and had seen a briefcase full of cash inside a conference room in Gendron’s offices that was related to municipal corruption in Laval.
“He said it was big what had happened in Laval. He said it was like a Mafia that was running this,” Juror No. 6 said in a comment that caused Accurso’s lawyer, Marc Labelle, to wince.
Juror No. 6 also said she shared the information with two other jurors — No. 1 and No. 7 — during a casual conversation when they arrived at the courthouse on Thursday.
“Did you add the opinion of your (distant relative), for example that it was run by the Mafia?” Brunton asked.
“I don’t believe so,” Juror No. 6 said tentatively, then blurted out: “No, no, no, no. I didn’t.”
Brunton then called in the other two jurors and asked them what they had been told. Juror No. 1 said: “I have no memory of this.” Juror No. 7 said her fellow juror only spoke in general terms and offered no details.
The judge then called in all of the jurors, except for No. 6, and asked them all if she had told them anything about Gendron. They all shook their heads in unison.
Brunton then determined that what the other jurors told him was incompatible with what Juror No. 6 had admitted.
“I don’t see how this trial can be viable,” Brunton said while finding the jury had likely been contaminated by Juror No. 6. “It is too dangerous to continue.”
When he informed the jury as a whole of his decision to declare a mistrial, Brunton said he was not assigning blame to anyone.
He also noted that it was the first time in his 15 years on the bench that he had declared a mistrial.
“This touches on Gendron, one of the most important witnesses, if not the most important witness, in the trial,” Brunton said.
“I don’t want to take a chance. I can’t control what happened.”
Gendron testified that several years ago Accurso handed him $200,000 in cash and that he delivered it to Jean Gauthier, a notary who worked for the former Laval mayor’s political party.
Gendron was the only witness who connected Accurso to cash exchanging hands.
Kim Hogan, one of the lawyers who represented Accurso during his trial, said the defence would have no comment on what happened. Accurso’s case will return to court in January to possibly set a date for a new trial.
Jean-Pascal Boucher, a spokesperson for the director of criminal and penal prosecutions, said the prosecution would be ready to proceed if and when a new trial goes ahead.