Jury in Baker’s federal bribery trial adjourns until this morning

Jury deliberations in the bribery trial of former Republican lobbyist and state senator Gilbert Baker will resume this morning at 8:30 at the federal courthouse in Little Rock after the jury of eight women and four men recessed Monday without reaching a verdict.

The jury met for about 90 minutes on Friday for deliberations and was in the courthouse from 8:30 a.m. until 4 p.m. on Monday.

Chief U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall Jr., who is also presiding over a civil jury trial that began Monday, divided his day between working through questions from the Baker jury and overseeing jury selection in a civil case scheduled to begin opening statements this morning in another courtroom.

Baker, 64, of Conway, is accused of bribing former Faulkner County Circuit Judge Mike Maggio to reduce a $5.2 million jury award against Greenbrier Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in 2013 in a lawsuit filed by the family of Martha Bull. Bull died two weeks after being admitted for a one-month rehabilitation stint at the center, which is owned by Michael Morton of Fort Smith. Maggio pleaded guilty to bribery in 2015 and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Baker is charged with one count each of conspiracy and bribery of a federal programs agent and seven counts of honest services wire fraud.

Jurors heard eight days of testimony before being handed the case Friday afternoon, including from Maggio, Morton, several political associates of Baker’s, former U.S. Attorney Cody Hiland, Maggio’s courtroom assistant and a law clerk of the judge’s.

The jury also heard hours of testimony related to text messages and phone calls that were placed in close proximity to the relevant times in the case that Assistant U.S. Attor

neys Julie Peters and John Ray White said were evidence of the crime. The prosecutors contend that Morton was watching the verdict closely and that Baker had arranged to funnel money from Morton to Maggio’s 2014 Court of Appeals campaign to ensure an outcome favorable to the nursing home owner.

Defense attorneys Blake Hendrix and Annie Depper maintained that those calls and texts, the substance of which could not be proved, were among hundreds of calls and texts that Baker sent and received on a routine basis as he raised funds for numerous political candidates. In his closing Friday, Hendrix said the phone records were “cherry picked” and that much of the government’s case consisted of “red herring” evidence intended to impeach Baker’s character while providing no solid evidence a crime had been committed.

Morton, who has acknowledged that the timing of 10 $3,000 checks meant for Maggio’s campaign and sent to Baker’s home on July 8, 2013, two days before Maggio reduced the award, looked bad, but he has maintained the timing was a coincidence. Morton has not been charged with a crime.

Maggio insisted on his innocence for months but pleaded guilty to bribery in 2015, then attempted unsuccessfully to withdraw his plea, saying he was pressured to plead guilty after he was told his wife was subject to indictment in the case. In his testimony last week, Maggio said he had solid legal justification for reducing the award but said he later concluded that he was also bribed to reduce the verdict.

During their first day of deliberations Monday, jurors sent out some questions related to the case, one of the more difficult ones being a request for a definition of the term “inference,” which has been used at some length during the trial due to the lack of a so-called smoking gun that would offer solid evidence of the crime.

At an end-of-day conference with the case attorneys, Marshall said he had first thought the word was “influence” but later realized the term was “inference” that the jurors were having trouble with.

“What is counsel’s suggestion on that?” Marshall asked.

“We were hoping the court has a suggestion,” Peters responded. “I think we are mutually agreeable that we don’t want to start giving them new instructions at this point.”

Peters said she had looked up definitions for both “inference” and “infer” and said those definitions appeared in two different places in the jury’s instructions “but I don’t know if there’s a particularly helpful representation there.”

“I, too, am a bit allergic to additional instructions during deliberations,” Marshall said. “On the other hand, inference is a term of logic and we use it in the law with some frequency but it’s probably something they haven’t encountered before.”

After consulting Black’s Law Dictionary and the Oxford American Dictionary and coming up with three similar definitions, Marshall elected to use the Black’s Law Dictionary definition of “conclusion reached by considering other facts and deducing a logical consequence from them” to instruct the jury.

“So I think I’ll just give them Black’s unless it makes someone howl,” Marshall concluded. “Mr. Hendrix?”

“No howling, Your Honor,” the attorney responded.