Raymond Martin ascending the steps to the Jackson Co. courthouse in January 2010.
SEVENTH CIRCUIT COURT OF APPEALS, CHICAGO—The highly-anticipated oral argument of former Gallatin County sheriff Raymond Martin’s appeal, set to occur Wednesday, didn’t go down as planned.
There’s been an attorney conflict as far as availability dates regarding Raymondo’s attorney, Diana Watral, and the whole thing has been moved back, after several gyrations, to Friday, Dec. 2, 2011. Many may not know that when an appeal comes before the appeals court, each side has a limited time to argue their case. In this instance, Watral will be arguing for Raymondo for a whopping 10 minutes. This might be the genesis for why the whole argument—that Raymond Martin needs a new trial because Christy Mann, wife of one of Martin’s dope sources, Brian Mann, was accidentally escorted to the jury room for a whole five minutes before someone realized the mistake, thus meaning the jury was ‘tainted’—is flimsy and somewhat superficial. There are only just so many ways an appeals attorney can whine this somewhat tenuous argument. Not to mention that the second argument—that the trial court erred when it sentenced Martin to life on the Weapons while in the course of a Drug Crime counts—is basically arguing something that’s federal code and won’t hold any water at all. But that’s what they get paid the big bucks for, evidently.
Additionally, prosecutors for the U.S. Government (lead by federal prosecutor James Cutchin) have filed a motion to have several documents sealed in the case. While they are stating that they realize the public has “the right to know,” they are trying to protect the identities of the jurors in the case, as well as not have Raymondo’s social security number and other identifiers out in the public domain. We’ll see if they’re successful in this endeavor; those of us who were there for jury selection know the juror’s last names anyway, so this whole thing might be a little excessive, but may be merely a necessary precaution, depending on the outcome of the case.
Be watching long about Dec. 2 to see if this really goes down…personally, we’d like to be up there to see it. Hey, you never know….