Now It's Blago Who Wants the Retrial

By Chuck Sudo in News on Jul 26, 2011 7:40PM

Citing judicial bias, former Gov. Rod Blagojevich filed a motion to be granted a retrial for his fraud conviction.

The Governor whose hair is perfect alleges in the motion that Judge James Zagel ruled too often in favor of the prosecution and not for his attorneys, hampering Blago's ability to defend himself. Wasn't Blagojevich on the witness stand for close to two weeks? Seems as though that was plenty of time to make his case to the jury, and the jurors in the retrial believed that Blagojevich was tailoring his testimony directly to them. That is, when Zagel wasn't admonishing Blagojevich and his attorneys to stay on point.

Blagojevich's lawyers wrote in the motion, “The convictions were the result of a fundamentally unfair trial, at which the defense was handicapped beyond repair by the Court’s rulings in favor of the government." They argued that Zagel should have been able to argue that he fought for health care as governor when prosecutors presented tape recordings of Blagojevich saying Obama ought to appoint him secretary of Health and Human Services in exchange for appointing Valerie Jarrett to the Senate seat.

It's the second motion filed since Blagojevich's June conviction for trying to sell the Senate seat formerly held by President Obama. Blagojevich's lawyers filed a motion earlier this month to retain jury questionnaires from the beginning of the trial. Blagojevich's attorneys are hoping in that motion to prove Zagel should have thrown out jurors who were biased against Blagojevich. During jury selection, Blagojevich's attorneys used all of its peremptory challenges, where they can excuse a juror for any reason. If they can prove that a juror was, in fact, not fair to Blagojevich, it can open up the possibility of overturning the convictions. But that's a big "if."

We still think the one thing that separated Blagojevich from some more "not guiltys" in this retrial was not having Sam Adam, Jr. on his legal team. Adam is a walking mass of proving reasonable doubt.