Mistrial declared as jurors deadlock
A judge declared a mistrial in the extortion trial of Hamilton County Commissioner Tim Boyd after a jury announced late Thursday it was hopelessly deadlocked in reaching a verdict.
Judge Andrew Freiberg, of Bradley County, discharged the jury at 10:23 p.m. after jurors spent nearly five hours deliberating whether Boyd was guilty of the lesser-charge of attempted extortion. Jurors received the case around 5:20 p.m., stopping at one point to ask in a note to the judge“What is exact penalty if convicted?” At stake was a Class E felony conviction that could impact whether Boyd, a three-time incumbent for District 8, can continue to sit on the commission.
Attorneys will set a new court date, likely in 2019, to determine whether the case will be brought again.
“We want to thank the jurors for their service, and we’re not going to comment further since this is an ongoing case,” defense attorney Lee Davis said. “It’s not about a victory or loss. We’ve got a judge who acquitted Tim Boyd of the extortion charge and a jury who worked hard. If necessary, we’ll go in front of another jury another day, but right now we want to thank these jurors for their service.”
At the beginning of Thursday, Boyd stood accused of threatening outgoing East Ridge Mayor Brent Lambert to drop out of their race during three phone calls in February. Otherwise, prosecutors said, Boyd would release damaging information that could embarrass Lambert, his family and his employer, the Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum. The charge, extortion, is a Class D felony that carries a two- to fouryear punishment.
But after prosecutors finished presenting their evidence early Thursday afternoon, Davis asked Freiberg to acquit Boyd of the charge. Though Freiberg declined to do that, the special judge said he didn’t believe Boyd had articulated a threat to Lambert. Instead, Freiberg ruled jurors needed to decide from the evidence whether Boyd intended to extort his opponent into dropping out.
Attempted extortion is still a felony, albeit a Class E felony with a lower punishment. According to online guidelines from the Hamilton County Election Commission, a felony conviction requires an elected county official to vacate his or her seat. Hamilton County Attorney Rheubin Taylor did not respond to a request for comment Thursday about what would happen in the event of a conviction.
During closing arguments, Davis told jurors the background story would show Boyd is not guilty. He said Lambert adopted a political strategy that involved recording Boyd and setting him up at a local debate, using a former city attorney and the Hamilton County Criminal Court clerk to turn those tapes over to local authorities, and then making that “dirt” the cornerstone of their campaign.
Davis said Boyd told Lambert his political team planned to release information, which was publicly available in a Feb. 3 news article and in campaign finance disclosures. Davis also noted Boyd said he “didn’t want” to harm Lambert or his family, but wanted to give him a heads up that his team would use that information in the campaign if Lambert decided to compete.
“Of course he did not intend to commit the act of extortion,” Davis said. “How do we know that? Because there’s a fatal problem with the elements of extortion. You cannot coerce somebody with a public statement: ‘Mr. Lambert, I am going to release your public statements to the voters.’”
District Attorney General Neal Pinkston said the case boiled down to Boyd’s actions, which he described as calculated. Pinkston said Boyd didn’t reach out to Lambert directly; he called a lawyer to relay a message to Allen McCallie, another lawyer who represented the Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum.
Davis chalked part of that up to Lambert ignoring text messages from one of Boyd’s political advisers, Ken Meyer, earlier in the year. Pinkston countered Boyd never explicitly mentioned what he was talking about, but Davis spent most of his cross examination of Lambert trying to show that Lambert was fairly certain of what was coming in the race.
According to trial testimony, Boyd’s political team said Lambert accepted five $1,000 campaign donations in June 2017, 12 days after the East Ridge Council approved a construction estimate to spend more than $4 million on infrastructure for an Interstate 75 Exit 1 development. Of the $5,000, $3,000 came from developers involved in the project — at a time when Lambert hadn’t had a campaign going for 31 months.
Nothing about that is illegal, and Lambert said he received those donations after a failed fundraiser he’d tried to throw around the same time. But Davis said the fundraiser never happened and noted that outside of his parents, Lambert had never received a contribution that large, or that many on the same day.