Bridge jury in query fury
THE JURY IN the Bridgegate trial asked the judge Tuesday about the nature of the conspiracy charges two former associates of Gov. Chris Christie face.
The lawyer for former Christie deputy chief of staff Bridget Kelly angrily declared to the judge, “You’re directing a verdict of guilty” to the jurors after a legal argument over how motive factored into the conspiracy charges facing his client and former Port Authority executive Bill Baroni.
Defense attorneys and the government had a lengthy debate before deliberations began about whether the feds had to prove Baroni and Kelly closed the lanes from Fort Lee to the George Washington Bridge to punish the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee.
Michael Critchley and Baroni’s attorney, Michael Baldassare, had argued their clients were not guilty of conspiracy if the plot to punish the mayor, Mark Sokolich, wasn’t proved.
The jury’s question of whether “the defendants be guilty of conspiracy without acting intentionally punitive towards Mayor Sokolich” revived the heated debate.
Newark Federal Judge Susan Wigenton said she would answer the jury with a simple “yes.”
“I’m going to respond to them (the jury) that you can be guilty of conspiracy . . . without this specific purpose” of punishing Sokolich, Wigenton said.
She had already ruled that the defendants can be found guilty of conspiracy regardless of motive.
Ephraim Savitt, a criminal defense lawyer and former federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, said, “There can be no criminal conspiracy without proof of what exactly the object of the conspiracy was. If the prosecution failed to prove that the object of the charged conspiracy was to punish the mayor, then it also failed to prove that the charged conspiracy existed.
“The judge’s simple ‘yes’ to the note would, as defense counsel pointed out, be an improper instuction for a directed verdict of guilt,” he added.
Earlier, the jury had asked whether it was legal for the government to interview a key witness in the case, former Port Authority official David Wildstein, “without the defendants’ knowledge or legal representation.”