Fired U.S. Attorney: Use of FBI to Contact Jurors “Smells of Intimidation”Count former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias among those who are critical of prosecutors’ use of FBI agents to contact jurors from the Pittsburgh trial of Dr. Cyril Wecht.
The contacts came after the judge declared a mistrial because the jury was hung. Jurors have since told reporters that most of them had wanted to acquit Wecht. Nevertheless, prosecutors immediately declared their intent to retry the case.
Iglesias, one of the nine U.S. attorneys fired in 2006 as part of the political purge, told me that he’d “never heard” of such a thing. “Using the FBI smells of intimidation. The [prosecutors] should have picked up the phone and called the jurors themselves. I would have not authorized the FBI to contact jurors in this manner.”
The spokeswoman for U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan has said that using the FBI agents was “commonplace.”
“If that’s true,” Iglesias said, “I would change the practice because it sends the wrong message to people.”
Iglesias also said that the case — which involves charges that Wecht, then Allegheny County’s coroner, wrongly billed taxpayers for mileage and gas costs that were really related to his personal business, costs that his lawyers say amount to less than $2,000 — sounds “penny-ante” to him. “The loss to the government is so small,” he said, that he thought many local prosecutors, let alone federal prosecutors, would “turn it down for being de minimis.”