Jury seated in former Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby’s federal perjury trial
After three days of questioning, lawyers in the federal case of former Baltimore State’s attorney Marilyn Mosby settled on a panel of 12 jurors and four alternates early Thursday evening to decide her trial.
The jurors and alternates swore before breaking for the weekend to consider the long-anticipated trial fairly and impartially. Mosby’s trial will begin in earnest Monday, with attorneys slated to give opening statements in the case.
“You as the jurors must decide this case based solely on evidence presented in the courtroom,” U.S. District Judge Lydia Kay Griggsby told jurors as part of her preliminary instructions to the panel.
Jury selection began Tuesday, with prospective jurors responding to a list of more than 50 questions intended to tease out their potential biases. After answering questions in a group setting, potential jurors faced follow-up questions one at a time in a courtroom with the judge, attorneys, Mosby and court personnel.
Over three days, Griggsby probed the pool of jurors about their knowledge of Mosby and her case, their ability to apply bedrock legal principles and their availability to sit for up to three weeks of trial.
Before trial, Mosby’s attorneys persuaded Griggsby to move her trial from Baltimore, where she served as the city’s elected prosecutor for eight years, to Prince George’s County. The defense lawyers put on evidence that the prospective jury pool for the courthouse in Greenbelt, which draws jurors from the Washington, D.C., suburbs, harbored less bias than those from the area the Baltimore courthouse pools from.
Several prospective jurors indicated they’d heard or read about Mosby or the case against her, but testified to varying degrees of knowledge about the case and whether they’d formed opinions based on what they’d heard.
A potential juror who identified himself as having been an attorney in Baltimore was familiar with Mosby and her case. Originally, the man said, he had a high opinion of Mosby but that changed after her indictment and when he learned about what she’s accused of.
“As much as I’d like to be involved in this case … it’d be hard for me to separate what’s in the sausage,” he said.
Another member of the jury pool, a woman who is a trained paralegal, said she’s familiar with Mosby’s name but didn’t know anything about the case or what she’s been accused of.
“I watch the news every day,” she said, calling herself “a bit of a news junkie.”
The woman said she routinely turns on a local news channel when she wakes up around 4:30 or 5 a.m. She mostly tunes out what she hears as background noise, but some items catch her attention.
Part of being a juror in a case is avoiding media coverage about it, which may prove difficult for such an avid consumer. Asked whether she could take a break from her news habit, the woman replied in the affirmative.
“This is a somber, serious business,” the would-be juror said of Mosby’s criminal trial. “I could comply there.”
Indicted in January 2021, Mosby is charged with two counts of perjury and two counts of mortgage fraud. Her attorneys won a legal argument for Mosby to be tried separately on the different charges, and the perjury case will proceed first.
Mosby claimed she suffered “adverse financial consequences” because of the coronavirus to secure a pair of early withdrawals from her city retirement savings account under the CARES Act, the first federal pandemic-relief measure, according to her indictment. Prosecutors say she suffered no such hardship.
According to the indictment, Mosby used the roughly $80,000 windfall to put down payments on a pair of properties in Florida: an eight-bedroom home near Orlando and a condo on the state’s Gulf Coast.
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That’s where the mortgage fraud allegations come in. Prosecutors say she neglected to disclose federal tax debts on loan applications and indicated she was going to use the property near Disney World as a second home, when she’d already lined up a company to manage it as a rental property, which locked in a lower interest rate.
The jury selected Thursday is not tasked with deciding whether Mosby committed mortgage fraud, but it is likely to hear some evidence that will factor into that case. Before trial, Griggsby placed limitations on what information about the Florida properties is admissible and how the attorneys may characterize the evidence.
Griggsby also asked prospective jurors whether they or someone close to them had withdrawn money from a retirement account under the CARES Act. A handful of jurors said they had.
One man said he had withdrawn money from his retirement account in 2020 to help pay for child care.
“I have a nonverbal, disabled daughter who has seizures,” the man told Griggsby. “I had a hard time getting someone to take care of her.”
While she hadn’t withdrawn money herself, another prospective juror said she worked in customer service for a retirement services business that distributed money under the CARES Act.
As part of her job, the woman said she regularly fielded calls from people with questions about the sweeping coronavirus relief package. The prospective juror said she and her colleagues explained “the rules” of eligibility “and pretty much left it up to them if they thought they were eligible or not.”
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