ASSISTANT U.S. Attorney Ashley Kost has asked the federal court to deny Bonifacio “Boni” Sagana’s motion for a new trial.
“The court’s discretion was well reasoned, appropriate, and afforded [Sagana] due process of a fair trial,” Kost said.
Sagana, represented by attorney Richard Miller, filed a motion for a new trial “in the interest of justice, pursuant to Rule 33 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure,” saying that Sagana’s “Sixth Amendment right to trial by an impartial jury was violated by pervasive and false pretrial publicity, in this small community of the Northern Mariana Islands, that Mr. Sagana had fled Saipan before he could be arrested.”
According to the prosecution, Sagana conspired with Bernadita Zata in producing a fake CNMI driver’s license. On July 19, 2023, jurors found Sagana guilty of conspiracy to unlawfully produce an identification document.
“The court specifically questioned prospective jurors about pretrial publicity of the case during jury selection to ensure an impartial jury,” Kost said. “Here, defendant has failed to establish there was any impartiality by the jury that weighed the evidence and ultimately rendered a unanimous verdict of guilty.”
Citing a previous ruling, Kost said presumed prejudice occurs when there is a “barrage of inflammatory publicity immediately prior to trial amounting to a huge wave of public passion.”
She said the “situation at hand was not one of a ‘trial atmosphere that had been utterly corrupted by press coverage.’ ”
She added, “Only five of the 49 potential jurors had responded in the affirmative that they had read or even heard anything about this case and none of those jurors were empaneled. Once empaneled, the jurors were directed by the court not to read or talk about the case. Although there was press coverage on the case leading up to the trial, the jurors were not in an environment of saturated media coverage; none of the jurors selected had even heard of the case.”
Kost said the defendant’s request for “additional voir dire was also unnecessary and redundant because the court covered the same areas in its voir dire that defendant proposed to elicit in his own process.”
Voir dire “is the process by which prospective jurors are questioned about their backgrounds and potential biases before being chosen to sit on a jury.”
Kost said, “The court specifically addressed counsel during sidebar,” but “no additional voir dire questions were requested by defendant.”
“During the voir dire at trial, the court asked if any jurors had heard or read any news about the case and narrowed the group down by section when asking the question. If a juror had responded in the affirmative, the court asked if they had formulated an opinion. These are the first two questions from defendant’s rejected proposal. The remaining questions all involved jurors’ potential actions due to their knowledge of the case. It is common sense that if a potential juror had no knowledge of the case, that juror is unable to take any action or be subject to unfair influence because that juror lacks any knowledge of external influences. The bottom line is this court covered the subject matter defendant proposed in his suggested additional voir dire,” Kost said.
In addition, she said the defendant “moved in limine to deny the [prosecution] a flight instruction.”
The motion was granted, but the court’s memorandum decision was issued under seal, Kost added.
“Defendant argues that because the decision was issued under seal the denial of the flight instruction could not be reported by the media to assist in resolving any misconceptions potential jurors may have held. This argument is circular in reasoning, because it wages an affirmative attempt to influence jurors via the media — or in other words, an attempt to get his cake and eat it, too,” Kost said.
She reiterated: “Only five of the 49 potential jurors heard or read about the case previously and none of those jurors were actually empaneled.”
The news stories “came out prior to jury selection and none of the jurors who had read or heard about the case were empaneled,” Kost added.
“Once empaneled, the jurors were instructed not to read or listen to news reports about the case and were continually reminded of this prohibition on breaks and at the conclusion of each day of the trial. Thus, any potential harm of pretrial publicity was mitigated through the voir dire process,” she said.
Kost said the “defendant’s concern that two potential jurors were not deeply questioned after acknowledging in voir dire they remembered Sagana was apprehended in Wisconsin and had to be brought back to the CNMI, is unfounded.”
“Situations such as this, when a juror vaguely recalls media coverage of a case, should be handled carefully because ‘further questioning may have only fanned the embers of incipient prejudice by arousing curiosity,’ ” Kost said, citing a previous ruling.
Kost and Assistant U.S. Attorney Albert Flores Jr. were the prosecutors during Sagana’s jury trial.
