GREENVILLE — Now begins the waiting.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Dennis Duffy and defense attorney Joe Cheshire gave their closing arguments Wednesday in the fraud trial of former state Rep. Stephen LaRoque, after which the case went to the jury to decide.
“I wish you good luck, and may you find justice,” U.S District Judge Malcolm Howard said to jurors before sending them out of the room.
Jurors ate lunch and discussed the matter starting around 1:30 p.m. until nearly 4 p.m., when Howard called the parties back in the courtroom and sent the jury a letter asking its intentions.
The jury forewoman responded on the note that the jurors wanted to leave for the day and return today to resume deliberations, rather than continuing on into the evening.
Wednesday morning, opposing counsel made their final pitch to the jury, with Duffy going first.
He attempted to compress more than two weeks of testimony in a little more than an hour, and counter-punched on some of the defense’s line of questioning the last several days.
Duffy took issue with the characterization LaRoque was completely open about his financial records, noting the reticence to turn them over during the defamation suit against former state Rep. Van Braxton.
He said the reason LaRoque didn’t want the documents to become public is they detail how he allegedly stole money from East Carolina Development Company.
“This is a case about a simple money grab,” Duffy said, later adding, “Basically, it’s theft — good, old fashioned theft.”
Duffy noted there wasn’t a reference to accrued earnings on ECDC documents until a change was requested in August 2011, when the Braxton claim of LaRoque stealing $200,000 from ECDC was hitting its high point.
With no signed copy of a disputed 1999 contract outlining LaRoque’s compensation known to currently exist, Duffy again maintained that a 2009, back-dated contract was meant as a way of covering himself to take money out of ECDC that wasn’t rightly his.
The question of guilt as to the first eight of the 12 counts against LaRoque heavily rest on whether there was a valid 1999 contract entitling him to pay equal to 3 percent of ECDC’s assets.
Cheshire opened up his final statement to the jury not by referring to the contract — which is at the heart of the defense’s case — but with an argument about the abuse of government power.
With the recent anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown by the Chinese government, Cheshire referenced the man who stood in front of a line of tanks. He talked about Rosa Parks, a hypothetical child standing up to a schoolyard bully and Congressional Medal of Honor recipients.
Cheshire mentioned the examples as a way of saying juries are in a special place to defend unfairly targeted citizens.
“They didn’t expect to be in that place, they didn’t want to do it, but did it because it was their duty,” Cheshire said.
He also criticized Duffy’s method of handling witnesses, saying he began talking fast and becoming combative when a witness didn’t say what he wanted, likening the quick-talking prosecutor to carnival “hawkers” he saw in Edenton as a child.
Cheshire revisited the testimony of witnesses who said there was a signed contract in 1999, or at least knew of an agreement to pay LaRoque 3 percent of assets under management.
What “assets under management” meant — just loans or total assets — remained in dispute as the trial drew to a close.
If the jury was to believe the prosecution’s assertions about LaRoque’s pay and the 1999 contract, Cheshire said, you’d have to believe Kinston accountants Lloyd Moody and auditor Angie Johnson were “stupid or lying.”
He also referenced testimony by Moody, saying LaRoque may not have needed to pay taxes on the loans allegedly taken against earnings from ECDC. Counts 11 and 12 of the indictment relate to whether LaRoque purposefully understated his income on his 2009 and 2010 tax returns because of the loans.
In a play at gamesmanship reprised from the opening statements, Duffy would cross the courtroom and look LaRoque in the eye as he talked, which Cheshire later said was inappropriate and in a manner demeaning to his client.
In the prosecution’s rebuttal to Cheshire’s closing argument, Duffy did it again.
Duffy said because he speaks quickly and with an accent doesn’t make LaRoque any less guilty, and Cheshire’s anecdotes were “completely irrelevant to this case.”
Duffy said LaRoque is in a triangle of guilt, with any of the three sides able to stand on their own. He said one side is theft (counts 1-8), one side is concealment (counts 9 and 10) and the other is tax fraud (counts 11 and 12).
Any sort of time table for the jury to return a verdict — or what the feeling of jurors is at the moment — is unknown, other than they needed more time to return a verdict than they had Wednesday.
Attorneys in the case have been advised to remain at the courthouse as the jurors deliberate, pending an announcement from the jury.
Wes Wolfe can be reached at 252-559-1075 or wes.wolfe@kinston.com. Follow him on Twitter at WolfeReports.