Her speaking out may cause a mistrial.
A woman excused from the jury Thursday at the corruption trial of U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez said she was dead set against convicting the New Jersey Democrat and his co-defendant.
“If I would have been there all the way to the end, it would have been not guilty,” said Evelyn Arroyo-Maultsby, 61, of Hillside. “All the way to the end, not guilty.”
But in what appears to be a stroke of bad luck for Menendez and his co-defendant Salomon Melgen, the U.S. district court judge overseeing the case dismissed Arroyo-Maultsby on Thursday so she could take a long-scheduled vacation.
The 12-person jury in the case has not reached a unanimous verdict after three full days of deliberations and will resume its discussions Monday with an alternate juror in Arroyo-Maultsby’s place.
Arroyo-Maultsby described the dynamics in the jury room as “very stressful” and said the “majority is still saying not guilty.”
But there is at least one adamant holdout, she said, and estimated that three or four jurors total were leaning toward a conviction.
“We have someone in there that definitely don’t want to hear it and saying he’s guilty,” she told reporters as she left the federal courthouse in Newark. “I think it’s going to be a hung jury.”
She also said she felt the government was “railroading” Menendez.
“I didn’t like this experience,” she said. “The unfairness and how it’s being presented, talking about him being corrupt. I think the government is corrupt. I think the government was the crooked one, not Menendez.”
The U.S. Department of Justice declined to comment on Thursday.
Miles Feinstein, a noted defense attorney from New Jersey who has handled many government corruption cases, said losing Arroyo-Maultsby is a real blow to the defense and that her statements to the press could create grounds for a mistrial.
Now that she’s gone, the deliberation has to start over, creating enormous pressure for other holdout jurors to cave in just to finish the process, he said.
“The fact that they have to start over, that’s really putting pressure on the jury,” Feinstein said.