In January 2009, I wrote a column about how former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich appointed Roland Burris to replace Barack Obama in the U.S. Senate in an effort to spoil the jury pool. Sure enough, one or more jurors hung on 23 of the 24 counts, and gave him a second chance to win an acquittal of those charges.

There are motions before the court to disclose the identities of the jurors, and it will be revealing if the juror(s) who couldn’t decide whether or not Blago was guilty were influenced by his appointment of Mr. Burris.  Just maybe, my boasting is premature, but I would be surprised if I was wrong.

The jurors, when polled by the prosecution and the press, said the jury instructions were like getting a manual on how to fly the space shuttle.  That’s a great point. When I teach law enforcement officers how to conduct conspiracy investigations, I always emphasize that you have to make the case understandable to your jury. Investigators must produce evidence that even the O.J. Simpson jury would understand and be willing to vote to convict.

Despite this, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald and his assistants presented evidence that a jury of third-year law students might find challenging. That’s why it took almost three weeks for the jury to come to its verdict.

In any event, I am certain that Blago’s defense attorney, Ed Genson, decided that it was never too early to taint a Chicago jury pool. And, he did a magnificent job doing it. He was searching for just one individual who felt that this was “politics as usual” in Chicago, and he obviously found at least one.

Even though the jury, when deliberating over some counts, voted 11 to 1 to convict, that lone juror is all it takes to make the prosecution’s case moot. Now the government needs to redo the entire trial and convince another jury “of his peers” that the former governor needs to go to a federal penitentiary for decades.

Blago, of course, is not out of the woods. A second jury may very well find him guilty on all counts, but that appears unlikely. Since he was only convicted of lying to the FBI, Fitzgerald will have to find a way to dumb down the other counts so that any layman can understand it. Whether he and his prosecutors have it in them to do that is not certain, but you can bet they will do whatever is necessary to ensure a conviction on those counts where the jury voted 11 to 1, and he may drop the other counts because it places too much of a burden on the jury to decide.

Complex cases always create complex problems. Considering that at least half of the jury probably voted to elect Blago as governor, the trick is to show that they made an error by ever allowing this man to serve as their state’s chief executive. I think the recorded phone conversations clearly demonstrate that he was frustrated with his job, and he wanted to move on to something more lucrative. Fitzgerald needs to find jurors who feel betrayed by him, and now want to extract revenge on this miserable public servant.

Having been through many complex federal criminal trials, I know from experience how to make the case more jury friendly. Obviously, the FBI agents working this, who did a terrific job, don’t understand that the evidence is only as good as what your common juror understands.

The prosecution has to know their jury pool, and present the prosecution to fit them, not a moot court setting in Harvard law school.

Reach Gregory D. Lee through his website: www.gregorydlee.com.

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