Attorney David J. Lujan filed the 12-page motion on May 1, stating that his client has been denied his right to a fair and impartial judge under the due process clause.
He said the federal court should order a new trial on grounds that the jury may have been rigged.
He said five of the jurors failed to disclose their relationships to government witnesses, particularly to former Commonwealth Utilities Corp. Executive Director Anthony Guerrero who confessed to conspiracy to fraud in exchange for a lighter sentence.
According to Lujan, the impartiality of the court not only can be reasonably questioned but “its actions cast a dark cloud of judicial misconduct over the proceedings.”
Lujan said the indisputable evidence of bias and misconduct is “overwhelming.”
The court, he said, met with a prospective juror/government witness without informing the defendant.
The court also made numerous comments demeaning the efforts of the defendant’s counsel, he added.
Moreover, he said, the court’s conduct created the impression for the jurors that the defendants were a threat to them.
Lujan said Munson should disqualify himself from any further participation in the case to preserve the constitutional integrity of the proceedings.
He said they retained a genealogist to determine the familial relations of the five jurors in question and some of the government witnesses to obtain their family trees.
Five jurors, he added, were related to the federal government’s key witnesses but failed to disclose their relationships.
“The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had made crystal clear that even a single biased juror violates a defendant’s constitutional right to a fair trail by an impartial jury and requires reversal on appeal,” Lujan said.
Bias may be presumed not only based on a juror’s material and repeated lies, but also when a juror is a close relative of one of the participants in trial.
On April 24, a federal jury found Villagomez and his co-defendants, former Commerce Secretary James A. Santos and wife Joaquina P. Santos, guilty of corruption charges.
Santos is Villagomez’s sister.
The federal court set the sentencing for July 28, 2009.
