Inside the deliberations that led jurors to convict Ridley-Thomas on 7 of 19 federal charges in the corruption case.
A jury convicted ex-Los Angeles Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas last week of seven federal corruption charges, including bribery, conspiracy and honest services fraud. The foreperson of the jury, Kirsi Kilpelainen, talked to The Times about how the panel reached its split verdict — finding Ridley-Thomas guilty of seven out of the 19 counts. This conversation has been edited and condensed.Everybody’s so invested in this and wondering what’s happened.
Did anyone have a hard time grasping that concept? That it wasn’t the money itself but the movement of it? We talked about it a lot. But most of the jury thought that the USC admission and the scholarship weren’t part of the bribe or the scheme. We read the whole thing. We considered it. It was obviously on the timeline, surrounded by a bunch of other events that were in evidence, but we just kept coming back to: is it illegal? Maybe that’s not something that they wouldn’t normally hand-deliver. But that doesn’t mean that anything in the letter or anything to do with the process was illegal.
We obviously discussed that. It was on the timeline. But we kind of all decided that it didn’t really matter why he resigned; what mattered was, what was his father’s involvement?Yes, of course, there were disagreements. I wouldn’t ever say there was any disagreement where people were heated or upset — we just weren’t agreeing. I just don’t want disagreement to come up with a negative connotation. We weren’t yelling or upset.
A lot of the defense took issue with the FBI agent and his statements about which documents he reviewed and a misstatement about the sexual harassment investigation into Sebastian Ridley-Thomas. What did you make of that?
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