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Home » Bias: the jury foreman in the Roger Stone case…

Bias: the jury foreman in the Roger Stone case…

The New Neo Posted on by

…was Tomeka Hart, and now it is being reported that earlier she had tweeted many anti-Trump posts, including the strong belief that all Trump followers are racists, and that she seems to have tweeted prior to the trial in ways that indicate she was against Stone as well.

Hart revealed her own identity as foreman in order to write a defense of the four prosecutors who resigned. At some point she scrubbed some of her previous social media posts, but not all:

According to Fox News, Hart posted and shared “anti-Trump, left-wing social media posts.” One post was about the Stone case, in which she retweeted a post that made light of Stone for arguing that he was subjected to excessive force…

A review by Heavy verified that Hart has posted a slew of political, anti-Trump tweets. Although her Facebook posts are gone, her Twitter page is still active, and it contains multiple still-visible political tweets, including anti-Trump tweets and parts of the now deleted Facebook posts, which she had also posted on Twitter. Some of her tweets are shares of articles that read things like, “What’s so extremely, uniquely wrong about Trump’s presidency” and “Leaked documents show Trump aide concealed ties to Putin cronies.”

More at the link.

I’m not at all surprised. And in fact, since just about everyone these days has strong feelings about Trump, pro or con, I’m only surprised that anyone is surprised by this, particularly since he was tried in DC. Wouldn’t almost everyone in a jury pool be anti-Trump?

Another question that immediately comes to mind for me is whether social media postings are considered during the jury selection process. Seems to be to be a no-brainer that they should be. This 2016 article on the subject is of interest:

The emergence of social media has greatly changed the process of juror selection. Now instead of reviewing the information that jurors make available to attorneys in court, jury consultants and attorneys can access piles of additional information on a juror by conducting a simple internet search. This presents a wealth of questions about the privacy to be afforded jurors and to the privacy of the jury process as a whole. Ethically, the American Bar Association model rules say attorneys can conduct “passive” searches of social media profiles and the internet when researching jurors, as long as they do not “friend” the jurors on any social media sites to access additional information or act fraudulently. Although ethically permissible, some courts have started to limit attorneys’ use of social media for the jury selection process.

Have limits been put in place that prohibit attorneys from citing the obviously-biased postings of a person such as Hart? Does it differ from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, or court to court, or even judge to judge and trial to trial?

I haven’t been able to locate answers to those question so far. And I have another one: if Hart was biased enough to have compromised the trial verdict, what would the remedy be?

Hart has also ran for Congress as a Democrat.

Here’s a partial answer to some of my questions, if true:

It may hinge on whether she answered those questions truthfully.

I predict nothing will come of this. But it’s very very disturbing.

[NOTE: Much more here. It seems the judge in the Stone case was refusing to accept the Stone defense lawyers’ objections to obviously and dramatically biased jurors, as long as they said they could be objective in the Stone case. Astounding. And yet at this point, sadly unsurprising.]

Comments

Bias: the jury foreman in the Roger Stone case… — 36 Comments

  1. It seems that the verdict should be tossed and the judge sanctioned or removed for permitting such a biased trial. This verges on Schiff’s show trial. Any lawyers out there who can shed some light on this?

  2. I was called for jury duty in the case of a university student charged with drunken driving. At the time I worked for the university and I was dismissed out of hand. No one asked me if I could be objective.

  3. Chuck Ross, The Daily Caller: Here’s What The Lead Roger Stone Juror Said During Jury Selection

    When Tomeka Hart was interviewed during the jury selection process as part of the Roger Stone trial, the former Democratic congressional candidate said she was generally aware of developments in the Russia investigation, but that she didn’t “pay that close attention” to the probe.

    She also insisted that Stone’s affiliation with President Donald Trump would “absolutely not” color her views of the longtime Trump confidante, according to a copy of a court transcript obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation. […]

    “You’ve also indicated a fair amount of paying attention to news and social media including about political things?” Judge Amy Berman Jackson asked Hart.

    “Yes,” she replied.

    “And when we asked what you read or heard about the defendant, you do understand that he was involved in Mr. Trump’s campaign in some way?” Jackson asked.

    “Yes,” she said.

    “Is there anything about that that affects your ability to judge him fairly and impartially sitting here right now in this courtroom?” Jackson queried.

    “Absolutely not,” Hart answered.

    rtwt

  4. I agree this is problematic but I would add that wouldn’t almost everyone in a jury pool be [either] anti-Trump or pro-Trump no matter where you hold a trial?

    Roger Stone in particular is a very divisive figure. I think it’s impossible to not have an opinion about him. Try him again. I just hope the DOJ can remain independent and loyal to the law and not to either side.

    I think part of the problem is Trump tweeting about cases like this. Can jury members be expected to not pay attention to them?

    Note today Bill Barr just said in an interview that he doesn’t like when Trump tweets about his department. He said he finds Trump’s tweets disruptive. When asked if he has a problem with Trump’s tweets he said yes. Then said:

    To have public statements and tweets made about the department, about people in the department – our men and women here, about cases pending in the department and about judges before whom we have cases make it impossible for me to do my job and to assure the courts and the prosecutors in the department that we doing our work with integrity.

  5. Was the DoJ independent of partisan political influence under the Obama administration, Montage? Or was it decidedly a nest of partisan vipers, and to the extent Obama and Holder could rig it to be, remains so?

    How about don’t try Stone again, since the first trial was a sham of a mockery of a travesty of a sham? That might just be better. Quit while you’re ahead, so to speak.

  6. Roger Stone may be divisive, but he’s also wholly unimportant. Hasn’t suffered enough though, for the partisan Democrats who hate Trump and see in Stone a means to get at the President. At him again, right?

  7. “…. and to assure the courts and the prosecutors in the department that we doing our work with integrity.”

    Oh yeah like the last 5, 10, 12 years….. right.

  8. As for Mr. Barr’s issues and difficulties, well, may I just say to my fellow Scot, “put down the bagpipes, laddie, and pull your finger out.”

  10. sdferr: the prosecutors should join with defense to seek a mistrial, and the DA should then drop all charges.
    Stone is surely important to himself, no? Even if this grotesque, lying rabid jury chair doesn’t think so. He has been all but bankrupted in the process.

  11. Trump, the Master-Tweeter is stirring up the media soup each and every day, dominating the headlines while the Dem Candidates are trying to get their messages out explaining why they should be the chosen one. Although his tweets annoy me they seem to work for him, so far so too bad Barr. As for the jury foreman being a total mess that along with the prosecution team it all just adds to the media mess while they keep it on the front burner and turn up the heat.

  12. This jury forewoman outed herself. No one — so far as I know — has looked into the remaining 11, who, it being DC, may be even worse in their prejudice.

  13. Note in this country that 60% of those convicted receive either time served in local jails or receive one of a menu of alternatives to incarceration. Of those actually remanded to prison, the mean time served is 30 months. Note, in the sum of state and federal prisons, about 50% are in on charges where the top count was a violent offense, 30% a property offense, and 20% a drug offense. The number of people serving for petty white collar offenses approches nil.

    They proposed to send a man to prison for seven years for a mess of felonious bolognius process crimes. One of the people I occasionally encounter in these fora is a prosecutor from Richmond who says he’s often surprised by what’s spit out by federal sentencing guidelines given what the usual resolution in state court would be for a similar offense. Seven years is the sort of time you’d serve in state prison for forcible rape.

    Andrew McCarthy is defending this travesty, which tells me that the professional culture of prosecutors is deeply disturbed. Montage, Media Matters per diem employee, is defending this. That’s another piece of evidence, in case you needed one, that gliberals and leftoids invariably pick the wrong side of any argument and are assiduous advocates of injustice and abuse.

  14. This jury forewoman outed herself. No one — so far as I know — has looked into the remaining 11, who, it being DC, may be even worse in their prejudice.

    You pick the names of 50 people out of a hat, you’d generally find maybe one who had contributed a three-digit sum to the Democratic Party or had circulated petitions or had done some volunteering in the last few years. It’s just not something aught but an odd minority do. They found someone who had run for public office in Tennessee but was somehow in a DC jury pool. She wasn’t excluded in voir dire and landed in the foreman’s position. I smell a rat.

  15. Leftists have plainly decided that Trump supporters have no rights they should feel bound to respect, to borrow from an infamous antebellum Supreme Court decision.

    Trump supporters have noticed. This matters. I recall a comment at Larry Correia’s site a while ago, that leftists believe violence is like a dial that they can turn up or down as needed, while for conservatives violence is an on/off switch.

    I’ve barely heard of Roger Stone, and to be blunt I don’t care much about him. But I do care that leftists are now conspiring to take away yet another right from people they dislike- that is, the right to a fair trial.

    This sort of thing is one more step towards turning that switch to on, which will of course be a stunning surprise to the left.

    They’re fools, although that might not be enough to stop them. Alas.

  16. Can we please scarify the federal criminal code? Law and order is the business of state courts. The federal penal code applicable to civilians should be limited to 30-odd areas of which transporting contraband across jurisdictional lines and running multi-state frauds and multi-state rackets ought to be the most common. And can Congress actually do their jobs and specify the sentances and sentencing formulae in the code, rather than subcontracting the job to an obscure commission?

  17. Leftists have plainly decided that Trump supporters have no rights they should feel bound to respect,

    Absolutely true. They have no procedural principles at all. They play Calvinball.

  18. It’s easy to think that our justice system is beyond repair but there is reason to consider that not all is lost.

    “After Attending a Trump Rally, I Now Know Democrats Have No Shot in 2020”
    “I’ve been a Democrat for 20 years, but my experience made me realize just how out of touch my party is with the country at large.”

    https://gen.medium.com/ive-been-a-democrat-for-20-years-here-s-what-i-experienced-at-trump-s-rally-in-new-hampshire-c69ddaaf6d07

    “For insight into how many liberals are reacting negatively to the democrat’s insanity, consider that from 20 to 60% of voters who are flocking to Trump’s rallies do not have a history of voting Republican — they are Democrats, independents, non-voters. They are Hispanic; they are black.”

    https://townhall.com/columnists/bradparscale/2020/01/27/trump-rally-data-show-a-clear-winning-coalition-in-2020-n2560202

  19. It seems to me that almost every trial goes forward with an appeal. Are there any substantial exceptions?
    That being the case, the defense will certainly raise an objection to the obviously biased jurors, and the biased judge perhaps as well.

    Arguably, we can’t throw out every prospective juror who is of the opposite party to the defendant, but surely we can toss high-information firmly-committed activists, even if they DO promise cross-my-heart and pinky-swear that they can be objective THIS time.

    As for Trump inconveniencing AG Barr with his tweets:he’s fighting the war on a different front.
    Without Trump calling attention to things from behind his bully pulpit, Democrat subversion might never be heard of by the regular LIVs.
    Although in Stone’s case, the DOJ already had the matter in hand, so maybe Trump could have held off a bit to see if Barr took care of business before putting out the stops.

    I don’t read McCarthy as defending the initial penalty recommendation, just pointing out that’s what the fill-in-the-blank sentencing guidelines come out with, and that most prosecutors and judges adjust for equity and for extenuating circumstances.
    Stone’s prosecutors did not.

    https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/the-roger-stone-sentencing-fiasco/

    The first thing to grasp about the Roger Stone sentencing fiasco is that Stone, even accepting the worst plausible gloss on his crimes, is a 67-year-old nonviolent first offender. If the criminal-justice “reform” fad were authentic, and not a stratagem of social-justice warriors who have taken Washington’s surfeit of useful idiots for a ride, then we could all agree that the original seven-to-nine-year sentence advocated by prosecutors was too draconian — even if it was, as we shall see, a faithful application of the federal sentencing guidelines as written.

    But no. Like criminal-justice “reform,” the Stone prosecution is more politics than law enforcement.
    …
    So, the Left has a quandary here: Do they hate Trump more than they love sentencing “reform”? We could have predicted the decision to go with hating Trump, and thus fomenting outrage over DOJ’s retraction of its original sentencing recommendation of about nine years’ imprisonment, now slashed to a far more reasonable range of four years or less. To be fair, though, Trump critics could not have been expected to resist the combination of DOJ missteps and Trump Twitter taunts that mark Stone’s sentencing, the combination that has managed to turn Mueller’s maulers into media martyrs.

    Some background: In a ridiculously overblown, overcharged prosecution, Mueller slammed the ineffable Stone with seven felony counts …

  20. Kurt Schlichter is fighting in the same war Trump is.

    https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2020/02/13/trump-charges-the-liberal-hacks-latest-ambush-n2561187

    All Trump did is follow a basic rule they taught me and every other infantry guy down at Fort Benning.

    You charge into the ambush. Full bore, no hesitation.
    …
    Literally no one on earth could say in good faith that was remotely appropriate for this case. …

    They did it to make Trump react. They knew the establishment and its submissive media would freak out. They thought they could derail his most epic run ever.

    Well, Trump reacted. He tweeted the manifest and undeniable truth – ….

    Trump charged right into the ambush.
    The reaction was predictable, especially after the DOJ brass realized these punk had bait and switched their sentencing recommendation.
    The DOJ promised to revise the recommendation and the media and liberal pols went nuts. This is the same media and the same liberal pols who want actual criminals to go free, who think arresting illegal alien thugs is a crime against humanity, and who want to close our prisons and turn them into Billy Jack-esque Rainbow Schools to teach hugging and climate paranoia to children.

    Then he questioned the judge’s impartiality, which you are not allowed to do because of reasons unless its Gorsuch or Kavanaugh. Then it’s totally principled, the principle being “the elite gets its way.”

    So, we got the #ImpeachBarr hashtags and the Very Serious Lawyers on Twitter and CNN explaining how undoing this breaking of norms and rules is a terrible breaking of norms and rules. As a lawyer, let me give you some free advice – take Twitter lawyer advice with a grain of salt. And that grain should be approximately the size of Mothra.
    …
    There was a lot of talk about how “troubling” and even “frightening” it was that Donald Trump “interfered” with the “prosecutorial discretion” of these first-line functionaries. There was little talk of how obviously it was a set-up designed to try to trick Trump into violating some newly created norm – that new norm being that a president must leave unaddressed manifest injustices inflicted upon his supporters.

    Except Trump does not play that loser’s game. They still think that Trump can somehow be shamed into obedience to the elite by castigating him for violating its arbitrary and unequally enforced unwritten rules.

    He can’t.

    We hired Trump to break the establishment paradigm that pretends our so-called betters are about the rule of law when they really just use the law to rule. If there is a “norm” or “rule” that requires us to look away and ignore when liberals twist and pervert the power of their positions to pursue politically motivated vendettas, then such “norms” and “rules” should not just be broken.

    They should be shattered.

    Rerun in your minds the Scooter Libby farce of a trial with President Trump instead of President Bush. That was a travesty on every side.
    Most people don’t like obvious unfairness; only partisan activists revel in it.
    MSNBC & CNN found that out recently.

  21. https://townhall.com/columnists/derekhunter/2020/02/13/trump-derangement-syndrome-fuels-liberal-hypocrisy-n2561261

    Indications are the four lawyers working the case, holdovers from the Mueller investigation, misled their DOJ bosses on what their sentence recommendation was going to be, so they were taken aback by the request for a term longer than the average for rape, assault, and many cases of murder. For example, just this week a 23-year-old in Arizona who shot and killed a 20-year-old college student and wounded three others on campus received six years in prison. You read that right, SIX YEARS. Lying to Congress is wrong, but no one died.

    Yet these “heroes of the First Amendment” think the better part of a decade is too good for Roger Stone? These cable news warriors must be furious when they see James Comey or James Clapper in their green rooms, people who lied to Congress walking free and booked on their shows.
    Former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, himself fired for lying to FBI investigators (the exact thing for which retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn is currently awaiting sentencing for), is a highly paid CNN contributor who was brought on air this week to, unironically, wax poetic about the president tweeting his anger over the idea of a sexagenarian being sent to prison for the rest of his life for lying to Congress.

    As you can see, these people operate in a different world, a different reality. Laws are for other people, and nothing they’ve done is ever remembered or relevant. Nothing they cheered or ignored exists when they find it politically convenient to take the opposite position to attack the president.

    The whole thing seems like a set-up, to be honest. The four Mueller prosecutors dramatically all resigned from the case after their bosses stepped up to rein them in, and immediately calls for investigations began bouncing off the walls of the liberal echo chamber. “Trump has interfered in this case and it’s an outrage,” cried people who’d cheered every Obama pontification about Ferguson, Trayvon, police in Cambridge, and any number of other cases.

    “He’d better not pardon Stone, that would be a miscarriage of justice,” sang the chorus of people who hope you don’t remember Barack Obama setting traitor Bradley Manning free after unrepentantly serving only seven years of a 35-year sentence.

    These people hope you don’t remember anything they’ve said or done. For them, history starts anew every morning. But the Internet is forever, and we do remember. And we understand the only difference between that which they accept or cheer and that they condemn is whether or not Donald Trump is doing it. It is the ultimate in hypocrisy.

  22. One thing that few want to admit is that Roger Stone loves the spotlight and he would like another trial so he stays in the headlines. He is a rather twisted individual – but anyone who has a tattoo of Nixon on his back would embrace that critique. How you get a jury that will not view him for what he is and what he fully embraces [conspiracy theories and all] would be difficult. I suppose Trump will have to pardon him.

  23. . . . he would like another trial so he stays in the headlines.

    “[Roger Stone] is twisted”, says the twisted dude who adores another man’s suffering. Good one.

  24. What Roger Stone is or is not is NOT THE POINT.

    What Roger Stone wants or does not want IS NOT THE POINT!

    “I suppose Trump will have to pardon him.” Oh puhleaze… you need to regroup.

  25. “Wouldn’t almost everyone in a jury pool be anti-Trump?”

    That was the whole point.

    With these facts, any fair judge would declare a mistrial.

  26. One thing that few want to admit is that Roger Stone loves the spotlight

    Nice try at a diversion. His histrionic dimension is quite irrelevant.

  27. Let’s keep some context in mind on the Democrats’ hyperventilating about rogue DOJs and rotten Presidents.

    https://www.redstate.com/nick-arama/2020/02/13/obama-interfered-basically-declared-hillary-clinton-innocent-while-case-was-being-investigated-but-democrats-said-nothing/

    In his appearance on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, President Obama told Americans not to worry, because “I guarantee that there is no political influence in any investigation conducted by the Justice Department, or the FBI, not just in this case, but in any case. … Guaranteed. Full stop.” [….]

    So when President Obama went on to double down on his claim last year that “I can tell that you this is not a situation in which America’s national security was endangered,” he was doing, as president, exactly what he was promising not to do — interfering.

    In fact, he was declaring her innocent before she has been proven guilty or not guilty.
    …
    Then on top of that, she was not prosecuted despite all the factual basis for charging her being there, as outlined by then-FBI Director James Comey. Comey, improperly, rendered a prosecutorial decision on the matter, after admitting that yes, indeed she did send and receive classified email and that it was likely her emails had been compromised. And this was after the meeting between Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch and the alleged conflict of interest that made Comey take over.

    So please, Democrats, remove the mote from your own eye first.

  28. Ok, so the burning question in my mind is what the hell were Stone’s lawyers doing when they let this woman on his jury? Where exactly did he get his legal representation? Costco?

  29. ” misled their DOJ bosses on what their sentence recommendation was going to be” is a watered-down version of the truth, that is: “lied to their DOJ bosses…”. Guess what? Even in D.C., lying to your boss about business ought to get you fired and your lies replaced with what properly should have been done in the first place.

  31. To: Barry Meislin

    My comment was directed at the faked furor over AG Barr’s actions regarding the prosecutors’ sentencing recommendation in the Stone case, not what the previous administration’s “stay-behinds” were likely ordered to do by someone from the previous administration.

  32. It’s already been said in these comments, but I just want to underline it:

    This whole Stone thing, from the FBI-agents storming his house while CNN filmed, to the 9-year sentence request, is not about Stone. It’s about trying to stir up Trump, to give the extreme leftists another opportunity to call for his impeachment. Eric Swalwell said it last night on Fox News: the Dems in Congress are looking at interference of Barr and Trump in the Stone trial, and they have not taken impeachment off the table.

    All of which raises an important question: must we as a nation put up with another five years of the House repeatedly re-impeaching Trump?

  33. F is right. They have made it clear that they will continue harassing and persecuting Trump and everyone around him for no legitimate reason, solely to try to get any form of protest or reaction to which they will fake horror and claim it’s an impeachable offense.

    Thus, they also set the stage to claim that any indictment against them for the actual abuses and crimes they are committing in order to do this is also Trump “overreaching” and “abusing power”, etc.

    That has been the pattern from the beginning. Someone on their side does something unethical or breaks the law; Trump calls them on it … and is the bad guy.

  34. That has been the pattern from the beginning.

    Right. This is because the extent of lawlessness in the Obama administration is well known across the entire Democrat apparat. The lawlessness was rampant, with literally thousands of participants. They all believed she would win, and hence they would escape responsibility entirely.

    Oops.

    And of course Trump’s win put not merely power to prosecute into his hands, but all the records of their crimes as well. They’re doomed and they know it.

    How to escape? The only possibilty is political. Make enough noise about Trump’s “political” prosecutions as “lawless” revenge; tell a strong enough propaganda to persuade the polity to clamp him down, and they just might escape yet.

    Hence, one after another the clown cars of a long train, every single scheme we have seen, and every scheme such as the present one and those to come. They won’t be quitting until they are behind bars, nor probably, not even then.

    And may I add, Pres. Trump has understood this from prior to his inauguration and has planned accordingly. That’s why it’s taking so long to roll out Durham’s work, as well as the other prosecutors we don’t know about yet. But they’re coming.

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