If a prosecutor lies and misleads the jury; is the jury really convicting an individual base on the application of the law?
I was charged with this statue. The first trial ended in a mistrial, the Jury Forman approached me at the end of the trial and gave me a thumps up. I find out later that the jury though I was being setup. That’s because when my former supervisor took the stand he was aggressive and his words were “I wanted Luis Out of here”.
The second trial was a disaster of lies. It all started when I filed a discrimination suite against my employer in Nov 2005. They settled and two month later I get subpoenas for a grand jury charging me with violation of the anti-kickback act. After this was dropped by one AUSA, my employer manages to get another agency involved and the honest service fraud statue was used. In my case not only were my first amendment rights violated but for some reason the key witness from the first trial changed. I thought I was in a fire pit, I read over 300 emails of hate and my heart broke to see that after all the hard work and money that was taking from me, it was all an internal conspiracy to get rid of me. One emails stand out the most. Destroy Luis!!!!
Even after giving testimony and evidence that I was not working with the employer at the time because I was in litigation, I still needed to let them know that I was working with another company. The worst part is that the president the Other Company lied, what a shame and I have no clue why he would do that or what drove him to not tell the truth? I am on appeal now and writing letter to several news outlets.
I’ am ready to take a polygraph if needed. This statue need to be seriously clean up for the private sector, it’s really dangerous when corp. internal policy can be used against anyone and let’s not call it retaliation call it Honest Service Fraud.
I must agree that there may be some issues with it being applied in the private sector but a new beginning or cleansing of the DOJ would help as well. What happen to honest discretion from prosecution? I feel for Thomas Spellissy, as a veteran myself I found out that hate over seats honest justices.