No mistrial, 11 jurors will deliberate bomb plot

The fate of the four men accused of plotting to blow up the Riverdale Temple, the Riverdale Jewish Center and shoot down jets over Stewart Air National Guard Base in upstate New York is now in the hands of 11 jurors after an evidence mishap last week.

The judge denied a motion from the defense for a mistrial on Tuesday and ordered the 11 remaining jurors to continue deliberations.

Juror No. 1, a woman, was dismissed after she told Judge Colleen McMahon she was not sure she could disregard extraneous information she saw in her transcript binder during the third day of deliberations Oct. 8. Jurors notified the judge that they were given information not admitted into evidence. Every juror’s “telephone binder” contained one set of extraneous transcripts and Juror No. 1’s notebook contained an additional one.

Because of that, the defense filed a motion for dismissal on Friday, which the judge denied Tuesday morning. Defendants James Cromitie, David Williams, Onta Williams and Laguerre Payen face life imprisonment and are charged with conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction within the U.S., among other charges.

“The only solution is to declare a mistrial,” said defense attorney for Onta Williams, Gombiner, who said the information seen by jurors was “not only an external influence, it was caused by one of the parties.”

Transcripts have been used by the prosecution to aid jurors throughout the trial. But somehow, on Oct. 8, jurors discovered transcripts not entered into evidence in their binders. It is unclear exactly what information was revealed, but news reports last week said when questioned individually by the judge, jurors said the transcripts were of telephone calls by two defendants from jail after their arrest in Riverdale on May 20, 2009.

Among the off-limits documents that were revealed, The New York Times reported that Theodore Green, defense attorney for David Williams, said the one distributed to all the jurors was a transcript of a conversation between Onta Williams and a woman about money he was promised for participating in the plot. The other was of a conversation between David Williams and his father about using entrapment as a defense, which appeared only in Juror No. 1’s binder.

Instead of using alternate jurors or ruling a mistrial, Judge McMahon said it was the preference of the court to continue with 11 jurors because deliberations had already begun.

Assistant U.S. Attorney David Raskin objected to the alternate jurors being sent home in case they run into a problem again. Judge McMahon snapped back at him.

“We run into a problem, we’re dead. We run into a problem, it’s over,” she said.

After being sent in and out of the jury room on Tuesday morning, one of the female jurors said, “This is getting crazy.”

After seven weeks of seeing and hearing evidence, the jurors began deliberating on Oct. 6, after a long series of summations from both the prosecution and defense. The prosecution tried to depict the four men as unordinary citizens predisposed to commit the crimes they are accused of. The defense tried to show the men were not predisposed to commit the crimes, but were entrapped by FBI confidential informant Shahed Hussain with promises of money and cars.

The trial moved into it’s eighth week Tuesday, as deliberations continued.