Joe.My.God. LGBT News
The Associated Press reports:
A jury said it was deadlocked Thursday in its deliberations of charges against a Colorado businessman accused of defrauding thousands of investors in a wall along the southern U.S. border hours after 11 jurors turned against one juror, accusing him of “political bias” and saying he’d labeled the rest of them liberals.
U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres rejected a defense request to declare a mistrial and instead read a so-called “Allen charge,” designed to spark productive deliberations Friday in the trial of Timothy Shea.
In their lengthy note, the jurors told Torres that the juror had said things such as “government witch hunt” and accused the government of bringing the case in New York City because it “knew people here vote differently.” The note said the juror added that the trial “should have been tried in a southern state.”
Courthouse News reports:
In the wake of Bannon’s pardon and his co-conspirators’ guilty pleas, Shea alone went to trial last week. During the prosecution’s two-hour closing argument this morning, Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicholas Roos told jurors that the “smoking gun” exists in Shea’s text messages.
“We need a solid fucking plan … otherwise we go to prison,” Shea said in one message to Kolfage, Badolato and his wife — words that Roos referenced repeatedly to jurors.
Prosecutors say that Shea created a shell company, the intentionally “vague-sounding” Ranch Property Marketing and Management, that created fake invoices and backdated payment requests to funnel hundreds of thousands of dollars in We Build the Wall donation funds to himself and his partners in the scheme.
According to the other jurors, the holdout declared Shea to be a good man because “he doesn’t beat his wife.”
Shea owns an energy drink company that features a superhero version of Trump on its cans, which claim to contain “ultra-hydrating liberal tears.”
Shea is accused, among other things, of using border wall donations to buy 50,000 cans of the drink.
Jury says it’s deadlocked in “We Build The Wall” fraud trial against Castle Rock man https://t.co/b6Xw6RjDAE #copolitics
— Colorado Sun Politics (@PoliticsSun) June 3, 2022