Matsumoto said he was in favor of convicting the former governor on all counts, and was not the only juror who felt that way. “I believe they proved their case beyond a reasonable doubt. I’m very regretful,” Matusmoto said.
Still, other jurors remained unmoved by the tapes and other evidence and testimony during the trial. Some jurors said, “Oh, they were just talking,” Matsumoto said.
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Early Tuesday morning, the jury had agreed to two guilty counts. A charge related to an allegation of attempted extortion of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel fell by the wayside as jurors lost confidence in the government’s evidence on that charge, said another juror, Erik Sarnello, 21, a student who lives with his parents in suburban Itasca.
The government had alleged that Blagojevich held up a state grant to the Chicago Academy until Rahm Emanuel’s Hollywood-agent brother, Ari, would throw him a fundraiser.
From the start of deliberations, some jurors admitted they believed from the start of deliberations that Blagojevich was guilty. “Some people said they thought he was guilty, but the evidence is really not there,” he said.
Sarnello said he knew by day three of the 13-day deliberations that the jury was in for a long haul. That prompted him to give a speech in which he sought to persuade fellow jurors to agree with each other rather than than extending deliberations. At that point, Sarnello believed Blagojevich guilty on several counts.
“It was petty obvious to me that some of these people needed clear cut evidence. They wanted to see the videos,” Sarnello said.
While jurors always have their own judgment to rely upon I would say some holdouts were likely not following the judge’s directions and were looking for a different standard of what a crime is. That happens and the government is going to have to do a better job of creating a narrative from the sounds of it, but I think there are several counts that could be convictions with a different jury. Conspiracy, for example, is generally “just talking. “
Key point:
Sarnello addressed the question of why the jury Tuesday asked for a copy of the oath they took at the start of deliberations. Some jurors felt one of the jurors was not deliberating in good faith. “Some people felt that they were deliberating not under what the law told us to do,” he said.
“What they were looking at wasn’t what we were supposed to be looking at based on what the judge gave us as a set of rules,” Sarnello said.