Lawyers for ex-House Speaker Michael Madigan are offering to pay out of their own pocket for a company to scrub prospective jurors’ social media and other public records to ferret out any potential biases before his historic racketeering trial gets underway.
In a motion filed Friday, the defense said the unidentified company would use its proprietary research protocol “to delve into potential jurors’ publicly accessible information, including public record searches and publicly facing social media profiles and platforms.”
The same company has provided similar services in two recent cases in Chicago’s federal court as well as in other jurisdictions around the country, the four-page motion stated.
The analysts will not contact potential jurors, their relatives or friends “in any manner” and will utilize anonymous accounts on the platforms it searches, the motion stated.
“Therefore, if a platform notifies users when their publicly available profile is viewed there will be no indication to potential jurors that any party associated with this case has viewed their profile,” according to the motion.
All collected data would be confidentially shared among the parties and destroyed once the trial is complete, the defense said.
The filing came after a hearing Tuesday at which prosecutors and U.S. District Judge John Robert Blakey expressed strong skepticism about the proposal to do online research during jury selection, suggesting it could quickly become cumbersome and have a chilling effect on ordinary citizens doing their civic duty.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Amarjeet Bhachu said the extensive questioning that Blakey and the attorneys are expected to conduct during the in-court selection process will be enough to identify and weed out potential bias.
“The jury is not a fantasy team composed by consultants, but good citizens,” Bhachu said. “… Their privacy matters. (If the) jury pool finds out there’s going to be this fiasco of somebody investigating me as a precursor to me being on the jury, somebody out there probing my background … I don’t think jurors will take too kindly to that. I think it will make matters worse.”
Blakey also seemed skeptical, in part because conducting the research for hundreds of potential jurors would take a significant amount of time and resources.
“The defendant is entitled to a fair trial, not every question possibly asked under the sun,” he said from the bench. “… At some point you have to presume some honesty on the part of the jury.”
But attorney Patrick Cotter, who represents Madigan’s co-defendant, Michael McClain, said that while some may find it uncomfortable, the process was necessary given Madigan’s high-profile status as one of the state’s most recognizable — and controversial — political figures.
“The defendants’ right to a fair and impartial jury trumps their discomfort,” Cotter said. “… Every once in a while the juror doesn’t answer the questionnaire correctly, every once in a while you find out, wow, that’s not what they really thought … this is a technological innovation (that) need not be intrusive.”
Madigan, 82, and McClain, 76, are scheduled to go on trial Oct. 8 on racketeering charges alleging Madigan’s vaunted state and political operations were run like a criminal enterprise while utility giants ComEd and AT&T put his cronies on contracts requiring little or no work.
ComEd allegedly also heaped legal work onto a Madigan ally, granted his request to put a political associate on the state-regulated utility’s board and distributed bundles of summer internships to college students living in his Southwest Side legislative district, according to the charges.
On Tuesday, Madigan was back in court for a lengthy hearing where Blakey heard arguments about proposed expert witnesses and some of the nuts-and-bolts logistics of the trial, which is fast approaching and expected to last up to three months.
Jury summons are slated to go out as early as next week, and the judge has agreed to keep jurors anonymous throughout the trial, with their names revealed publicly only after they reach a verdict.
Given the length of the trial, Blakey said he would select the maximum of six alternates in addition to the 12-juror panel. The defense will be able to use a total of 20 peremptory strikes, while prosecutors will get 12, he said.
jmeisner@chicagotribune.com
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