The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers has called for Ghislaine Maxwell to get a new trial after a juror in the case was accused of hiding his history of sexual abuse.
The group made their call in a brief filed in New York court on Friday, one day after the judge who oversaw the original trial ordered Juror 50 to “give testimony under oath in response to the Court’s questions” at a hearing on 8 March.
Juror 50 has previously spoken to the press under the name Scotty David, revealing he had personally suffered sexual abuse as a child – something Maxwell’s lawyers say he did not disclose during jury selection.
The NACDL said Juror 50’s media statements “establish both implied and inferred bias”.
“The average person who was sexually victimized and had Juror 50’s feelings about the crime and those who complain about it could not be fair, his protestations notwithstanding,” read the brief obtained by journalist Julie K Brown.
“To borrow Chief Justice Marshall’s phrase, Juror 50 should have been ‘cautiously incapacitate[d] from serving on this jury.”
It concludes: “The Court should not allow any juror to thwart its screening process by giving inaccurate answers and thereby create such a grave potential, realized in this case, for depriving the defendant of her right to a fair trial. A new trial is required.”
In December, Maxwell was found guilty of five charges related to trafficking teenage girls for her former boyfriend, the deceased sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein.
Shortly after the trial concluded, Mr David gave a series of media interviews in which he spoke about the sexual abuse he suffered as a child and how he’d worked to convince other jurors to convict Maxwell.
Following the interviews, Maxwell’s lawyers accused Mr David of not truthfully answering pre-trial questions, including one which asked if potential jurors if they or anyone close to them had previously been a victim of sexual abuse.
Maxwell’s lawyers have said Mr David’s failure to disclose his history “corrupted” the judicial process and necessitated and new trial.
“Juror 50’s responses to the jury questionnaire and questions posed to him during in-person voir dire [jury selection] corrupted the voir dire process and violated Ms Maxwell’s right to a fair trial,” attorney Christian Everdell wrote in a motion on 8 February. “As set forth in the Motion, the defense believes that the existing record is clear and more than sufficient for the Court to grant Ms Maxwell a new trial without the need for further factual development.”
Judge Alison Nathan took up the issue in an order on Thursday requiring Mr David to testify under oath.
“The Court concludes, and the Government concedes, that the demanding standard for holding a post-verdict evidentiary hearing is met as to whether Juror 50 failed to respond truthfully during the jury selection process to whether he was a victim of sexual abuse,” Ms Nathan wrote. “Following trial, Juror 50 made several direct, unambiguous statements to multiple media outlets about his own experience that do not pertain to jury deliberations and that cast doubt on the accuracy of his responses during jury selection.”
She made it clear that his history did not disqualify him as a juror. The question, she said, is whether he revealed that history when he was required to do so.
“To be clear, the potential impropriety is not that someone with a history of sexual abuse may have served on the jury,” the judge wrote. “Rather, it is the potential failure to respond truthfully to questions during the jury selection process that asked for that material information so that any potential bias could be explored.”
The defence notably did not mention concerns about Mr David in its formal motion for a mistrial, which argued that the original trial was unfair for a number of reasons – including that the charges were brought too late, many of the alleged sex acts took place outside of New York, and the conspiracy charges overlapped, and therefore should not count as separate crimes.
Judge Nathan denied that motion for a mistrial on Thursday, citing the need for additional information regarding Mr David.
