THE JURORS: 'We were here to represent the people who didn't have a voice'
On the first day the 12 jurors in Tony Rezko's corruption trial sat down to deliberate, they were split nearly evenly between those who thought he was guilty and those who thought him innocent, juror Randall Franz, 30, recalled.
"That first day, there was a lot of dissension," the postal carrier said Wednesday night in his Montgomery duplex. "Some people sitting through the trial saw one thing, some saw something else."
(Tom Cruze/Sun-Times/AP)
They didn't focus on Gov. Blagojevich or Barack Obama -- two beneficiaries of Rezko's fund-raising whose names surfaced at trial. Instead they looked at the shakedown schemes involving the state Teachers' Retirement System and the Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board.
"We were here to represent the people who didn't have a voice in this case," said juror Susan Lopez, a school administrator.
They did take a hard look at the government's star witness, Stuart Levine, portrayed by Rezko's lawyers as a liar and longtime heavy drug user with a bad memory.
Juror Andrea Coleman said the jury gave Levine's testimony "no weight" and found "he was very dis-credible to us. So we set aside Mr. Levine's testimony because he played with us, also, in the courtroom."
But other jurors said they considered Levine's testimony along with other evidence including wiretaps, e-mails and documents.
"On those counts where Levine was involved, we put it in consideration with everything else," juror Mona Lisa Mauricette said. "We weren't going only on Levine's testimony . . . We found consistency in the testimony and credibility when we looked at it all together."
Jurors deadlocked for "several days" on Count 13, which involved an April 17, 2004, phone call from Levine to friend and partner Dr. Robert Weinstein to discuss the applications of three money-management firms -- Stockwell, IMH and Capri Capital -- to handle teacher pension investments, Franz said. The jury eventually convicted Rezko on that wire-fraud count, as well as 15 of the other 23 counts.
The discussions stayed calm: "We never got to the point where people were shouting," Franz said. "People would voice their opinion with some emotion behind it."
Franz, who said he doesn't follow state government closely and only votes in national elections, said the trial offered "eye-opening" glimpses at Illinois politics.
"To be appointed to a board, you have to know somebody close to the administration -- no matter whose administration it is," he said.