Sore Losers? The FBI Wants To Visit The Wecht Jurors

If you are going to try and kill the King, you better damn well get it done. Cyril Wecht is a celebrity pathologist superstar. This means that the Cyril Wecht prosecution is a suitcase trial. If you are the prosecutor, you pack your suitcase ahead of time. If you don’t win, you leave town. Maybe that’s why the Wecht prosecutors were so quick to announce they would retry the case, almost right away, despite a hung jury leaning toward acquittal.

The haste to announce retrial was unseemly. Judge Schwab’s strong advice to the jury not to discuss the case with the press or the attorneys was bizarre at best and improper at worst. The publicly displayed animosity between the defense team, which includes a former U.S. Attorney General, and Judge Schwab was stunning. This just doesn’t happen at the federal level. 

The FBI’s decision to call some of the jurors to interview them about the case, reported here in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, was unusual and stupid, although Judge Schwab’s decision to wisk the jury away quickly after the trial obviously prompted the move.

I started reading about the Wecht trial late in the day. Press coverage has been abysmal. Some things are clear, though, from merely reading the indictment. The case looks pretty chicken-_____ at best.

Prosecutors and defense atttorneys divide crummy cases into two fundamental categories; chicken-_____ and bull-_____. Chicken-_____ cases allege actual crimes, but the charges, even if true, are technical and/or low-grade in nature. Bull-_____ charges are not really crimes at all. They are not “righteous” and never should have been brought in the first place.

The government charged way too many counts in the Wecht case. Most of them appear to be incredibly petty “misuse of public office charges” masquerading as honest-services mail and wire fraud. But honest service fraud cases usually require, in the absence of bribes or kickbacks, lying and/or concealment by a defendant regarding his/her theft of honest services. The Wecht indictment doesn’t do a great job of setting this lying/concealment out and neither, apparently, did the evidence. (Dr. Wecht’s private forensic pathology practice was well known to all.)

The only thing in the indictment that looks like a real crime, if true, is Dr. Wecht’s alleged billing of private clients for reimbursement for transportation expenses that were actually provided by the county. The indictment charges that phony receipts from a defunct company were used in connection with these bills. But even if this happened and Dr. Wecht knew about it, it isn’t the kind of thing you typically see prosecuted at the federal level. It falls under the category of petty theft or greed–fodder for state cases or private lawsuits at best.