SnapGlow.TV: Modern Gems Galore! The federal judge who is set to sentence former State Sen. Vincent J. Fumo rejected Fumo's bid yesterday for a new trial, saying a defense request to explore whether jurors had learned prejudicial facts about Fumo was a mere "fishing expedition."
Such an inquiry, U.S. District Judge Ronald L. Buckwalter concluded, would needlessly "undermine the finality of the jury verdict" in the five-month trial.
Fumo, 66, a once-powerful Democrat who was convicted in March of all 137 counts against him, sought a hearing on the issue last week after learning about juror comments from a freelance writer for Philadelphia Magazine, which posted an article about the trial on its Web site this week.
The judge's ruling was another loss for Fumo in the week leading up to his sentencing Tuesday. He could face a potential prison term of 21 to 27 years under federal sentencing guidelines, though Buckwalter is free to impose any sentence.
Fumo was found guilty of defrauding the state Senate by getting workers to do personal and political-campaign work on state time, and defrauding two nonprofits, Citizens' Alliance for Better Neighborhoods and the Independence Seaport Museum.
Meanwhile, the first codefendant in the case reported to prison Wednesday. Leonard P. Luchko, who had been a computer technician in Fumo's South Philadelphia district office, surrendered to a federal prison near Scranton to begin serving a 21/2-year sentence.
Luchko pleaded guilty to obstructing justice, saying he followed Fumo's orders to erase e-mail that the FBI was seeking. He saw the senator as his surrogate father. In court, Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert A. Zauzmer described Luchko as a "loyal staff person . . . who would stand in front of a train" for Fumo.
In the Philadelphia Magazine article, Ralph Cipriano wrote that a juror told him she had learned, when she was at work during a break in the trial, about Fumo's 1980 corruption conviction, which was later overturned.
He also reported that the juror had learned that the former president of the Independence Seaport Museum, John S. Carter, was in prison.
Buckwalter had barred prosecutors from making any reference to the earlier Fumo case, or to Carter's conviction.
Cipriano, a former Inquirer reporter, also wrote that another juror told him that the entire jury knew at the start of the final day of deliberations about news reports that a juror had posted messages on his Facebook and Twitter pages during the trial.
The defense team wanted a hearing so that the judge could question the jurors, saying it was likely that many jurors occasionally had disregarded the judge's frequent instructions to report any exposure to news reports.
"Exposure to such reports is precisely the type of extraneous information that gives rise to a presumption of prejudice," defense lawyers Samuel Buffone, Dennis J. Cogan, and Peter Goldberger stated in a court filing this week.
Buckwalter disagreed.
"The defendant's hearing request is precisely the sort of 'fishing expedition' against which our jurisprudence has cautioned," the judge wrote in an opinion filed yesterday.
Barring a pressing case that someone had not gotten a fair trial, Buckwalter wrote, jurors were entitled to be left alone after performing their job.
Moreover, he said, he found "nothing earth-shattering" in Cipriano's article.
The article did not document that the jurors had in any widespread way violated his order to refrain from following media coverage of the trial, the judge wrote.
As for one juror learning of Fumo's previous case, the judge wrote that he wasn't persuaded Fumo had been hurt in any significant way.
Contact staff writer Emilie Lounsberry at 215-854-4828 or elounsberry@phillynews.com.
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