Former New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez asked a judge on Wednesday to grant him a new trial in his bribery case due to news that prosecutors found improper evidence placed on computers accessed by jurors.
His legal team filed papers in Manhattan court, saying a new trial is “unavoidable.”
Menendez was convicted of bribery and other charges in July after allegations surfaced that he accepted bribes in exchange for approving military aid to Egypt. The conviction forced him to resign from his Senate seat in August and abandon his reelection bid. Gov. Phil Murphy (D-NJ) appointed Sen. George Helmy (D-NJ) to take his place.
The former senator is scheduled to be sentenced on Jan. 29, and he could go to prison for years.
Prosecutors sent a letter to Judge Sidney Stein earlier this month detailing that information the judge ruled should not be included in the trial was mistakenly uploaded to a computer used by jurors.
They said that no action was necessary in light of the error for several reasons, including that defense lawyers did not object after they inspected documents on that laptop before it was given to jurors.
The prosecutors argued there was a “reasonable likelihood” that no jurors saw the information on the computers and that the documents could not have affected the defendants anyway because they were of “secondary relevance and cumulative with abundant properly admitted evidence.”
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Menendez’s lawyers disagree. They said that the exhibits contained the “only evidence in the record” tying Menendez to military aid to Egypt, “an otherwise-missing fact at the very center of the central charge against him.”
“In light of this serious breach, a new trial is unavoidable, despite all the hard work and resources that went into the first one,” they wrote.
