On Monday, the jurors in the case of Raj Rajaratnam are likely to begin deliberations, trying to decide if the billionaire founder of the Galleon Group LLC hedge fund was an unscrupulous inside trader or if he made his fortune by shrewd but legal investing.
There were no Good Friday proceedings in the Manhattan courtroom of Judge Richard J. Holwell of the Southern District of New York. So the last arguments the jurors heard before heading into the Easter Weekend were on Thursday, as prosecutor Jonathan Streeter began to rebut the defense’s closing summation.
Imagine yourself just an average investor, Streeter asked the jurors, according to an account in The New York Times. Imagine yourself trying to sift through the mountains of information available nowadays. “Now imagine that you have all that plus you have an insider at a bunch of companies,” Streeter said. “Which do you think has a huge advantage?”
Chief defense lawyer John Dowd, of course, saw things through a different prism. “He took advantage of public information available to the whole world, and that’s why you must acquit,” Dowd said of his client, according to The Times’ account.
Streeter is expected to finish his rebuttal early enough on Monday for the judge to instruct the jurors, who will decide if Rajaratnam should go to prison for a couple of decades for conspiracy and securities fraud, or walk free, albeit quite a few million dollars poorer after he pays his lawyers.
Or maybe the jurors won’t decide. Maybe they will be so stupefied by the mass of evidence they’ve been subjected to since early March that they will be deadlocked. It only takes one juror to stall things. Or, perhaps, they will deliberate for many, many hours and collectively conclude that their inability to decide should go in the defense’s favor. Rajaratnam is not obligated to prove his innocence, after all.
And while we’re on the subject of psychology, generally speaking, consider what Dowd said about one prosecution witness who had pleaded guilty, like nearly a score of others, to testify against his erstwhile friend Rajaratnam: “Belligerent, hostile, uncooperative and downright bizarre.”
It’s standard in criminal trials for the defense to attack prosecution witnesses who plead guilty in return for leniency. The defense tells jurors, in essence, that they shouldn’t believe people who have already admitted their own wrongdoing and betrayed someone’s trust in doing so.
To which the prosecution generally replies: We can’t always choose our witnesses. People with knowledge of crimes are often criminals themselves. That’s the way of the world. Besides, our witnesses have every incentive to tell the truth. That’s the only way they’ll get a break.
One difference in this case is that the people who pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors don’t look like criminals. Until recently, in fact, they may not have thought of themselves as criminals. (One sad side story in the whole episode is that of a young lawyer caught up in the inquiry who pleaded guilty to charges that could send him away for years, as Main Justice reports in a separate account.)
There has been plenty of speculation about how each side is doing. Was Rajaratnam smart not to take the stand? Probably, in the opinion of several observers. But some lawyers not connected with the case thought the defense made a tactical mistake in not deflating tidbit of information about a witness, letting the prosecution pounce on it instead in cross-examination (see our earlier report).
But is it possible that the prosecution offered too much information? “The jury’s patience with the nearly two-month long trial appeared to wear thin,” The Times reported on Thursday’s session. “As Mr. Streeter continued his summation past 5 p.m. — the hour at which the court usually breaks for the day — two jurors groaned. Another rolled her eyes and put on her coat.”
