Here, nine persons were accused of having conspired to murder a well-known personality from South Philadelphia. The defense lawyer of the primary defendant was initially very worried about the outcome since the judge assigned to the case had a reputation as being extremely tough: a “hanging judge,” so to speak. All defendants faced the death penalty, and his client was the one whose odds were definitely the worst.
As it turned out, the defense attorney’s fears were largely unfounded. The defense was given ample time to ensure a fair jury selection process even before the process actually began, since the judge had no objection whatsoever to a questionnaire being passed out to all potential jury members, with the “completed forms … returned to the attorneys on both sides.” In his 2001 memoirs, the defense attorney mentioned above gives a colorful description of how all this “seemed to work like a charm” for the defense.
Since the judge never seemed to rush the proceedings, it took close to a month to pick “a jury of twelve and six alternates.” It appears that the defense attorney never had the slightest trouble with the trial judge and was virtually unconstrained in putting on evidence destroying the prosecution’s claims – undoubtedly helped by practically unlimited funds enabling him to do so.
When the prosecution rested its case, the trial was already in its third month. The main defendant’s lawyer was quite satisfied since the judge, “with his tough reputation, wasn’t really treating the defense all that badly,” and also “prevented the prosecutors from going to far with evidence of other crimes committed by the defendants on trial,” which, in this case, would have included “murders allegedly ordered” by the main defendant and “committed by the co-defendants.”
This courteous treatment of the defense extended to the summation, where the judge let the lead defense attorney shift his final speech for the defense from Friday to Monday to prevent the jury both from forgetting the message and from scrutinizing it to much by reviewing the transcript. By the time of the summations, the trial was in its fourth month, with no apparent attempt of the judge to hasten it or to treat the defense unfairly in any other way.
The defense counsel from whose memoirs this description and all quotes above are taken was the prominent Philadelphia mafia lawyer Robert Simone.
The main defendant in this trial, which ended in May 1988 with an acquittal of all nine defendants, was Nicodemo “Nicky” Scarfo; he and his eight co-defendants who all also belonged to the Scarfo faction of the Philadelphia mob stood accused of having organized the murder of Scarfo’s capo and chief executioner, the brutal Salvatore Testa.
The name of the judge was Albert F. Sabo.
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