A federal judge on April 16 ruled that President Donald Trump’s longtime friend and former adviser, Roger Stone, will not be granted a new trial, saying that his legal team’s claim that the jury forewoman is tainted by political bias “is not supported by any facts or data and it is contrary to controlling legal precedent.”
His lawyers filed a motion for a retrial after raising concerns about a juror’s political leanings, alleging that she lied on a questionnaire during panel selection.
Jackson was appointed by former President Barack Obama.
Jackson said Stone’s legal team failed to fully question and research the jury forewoman, Tomeka Hart.
Stone’s request for a new trial “is a tower of indignation, but at the end of the day, there is little of substance holding it up,” Jackson said in her opinion.
Stone is now expected to ask an appeals court to throw out his conviction. Jackson’s order says Stone has 14 days from Thursday’s ruling to file an appeal or report to serve his sentence at the institution designated by the Bureau of Prisons.
Requests for a new trial followed the emergence of anti-Trump social media posts made by Hart shortly before Stone’s filing. Some of the posts clashed with her assertions to the court that she didn’t “pay that close attention” to the probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
On the day of Stone’s arrest, the juror linked to an article about Mueller’s investigation along with the words “Brought to you by the lock her up peanut gallery,” referring to “lock her up” chants by Trump supporters in 2016 about Clinton.
Hart told the judge that there was nothing about what she’s heard or read about Stone that would affect her ability to judge him fairly. She said she couldn’t recall anything specifically she’d heard or read.
However, Jackson ruled that Hart’s opinions about the president did not mean she was biased against Stone.
“At bottom, the defense merely posits that if you do not like Donald Trump, you must not like Roger Stone, or if you are concerned about racism on the part of some of the President’s supporters, then you must be applying that label to Roger Stone because he was a supporter, too,” Jackson wrote in the opinion.
“While the social media communications may suggest that the juror has strong opinions about certain people or issues, they do not reveal that she had an opinion about Roger Stone, which is the opinion that matters.”
“The assumption underlying the motion—that one can infer from the juror’s opinions about the president that she could not fairly consider the evidence against the defendant—is not supported by any facts or data,” she wrote.
