Shkreli's Ex-Lawyer Says Juror Threats Are Grounds for New Trial
Shkreli's Ex-Lawyer Says Juror Threats Are Grounds for New Trial
(Bloomberg) -- The case may not be closed for a former lawyer who was convicted of helping Martin Shkreli commit fraud. A juror who earlier flagged concerns about the deliberations said he "felt threatened and forced to vote ‘guilty’" for Evan Greebel, even though he didn’t agree with the decision.
"I felt then and still feel today that Mr. Greebel was not guilty and should not have been charged," Desmond Sankar, a part-time employee for a messenger service in Queens, said in the affidavit filed Saturday. "Mr. Shkreli alone is to blame for the wrongdoing."
Sankar’s statement was part of a request by Greebel’s lawyers for a new trial. Greebel, 44, was convicted in January of conspiring with Shkreli to defraud a pharmaceutical company and in a scheme to manipulate ownership of its shares. Lawyers are also claiming insufficient evidence, procedural shortfalls, and jury-instruction problems.
Shkreli, a 34-year-old hedge-fund-manager-turned-biotech-founder, was accused of defrauding investors, losing their money in bad trades, and paying them back with assets from the drug firm, Retrophin Inc. He was convicted in federal court in Brooklyn in August in a separate trial of lying to the investors and scheming to manipulate the drug firm’s shares, but acquitted of stealing from the company.
Shkreli was jailed in September and is slated to be sentenced March 9. No sentencing date is set for Greebel.
Overturning the verdict based on the juror’s claims isn’t likely, said Bennett L. Gershman, a law professor at New York’s Pace University.
"A jury’s verdict can’t be impeached," Gershman said. "It’s basically to provide finality, and to try to prevent what’s happening here: Getting jurors to say things that happened inside the jury room that may or may not be true."
To contact the reporter on this story: Christie Smythe in Brooklyn at csmythe1@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Glovin at dglovin@bloomberg.net, Paul Cox, Joe Schneider
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