for BigTrial.net
The government saw an international conspiracy in a $6,000 scholarship that state Senator Larry Farnese arranged six years ago for the daughter of a Democratic committee woman who wanted to study abroad in Central Asia.
But a jury didn't see it that way. After a week-long trial, a jury today found Farnese and Ellen Chapman, the Democratic committee woman who was his co-defendant, not guilty on all 13 charges in an overblown federal indictment that alleged conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud, as well as violations of the U.S. Travel Act.
For Farnese, it was the end of a 14-month ordeal that began with a grand jury investigation. The news that the FBI was snooping around Farnese's 2011 election as ward leader hit The Philadelphia Inquirer last April. The federal indictment of Farnese and Chapman was announced a month later.
"I always believed that this day would come," an emotional Farnese said today. "I'm an attorney and an elected official and so I never lost faith in the system. In fact, what happened today just reaffirms my faith in the system."
"I lost my dad about six months before this started," Farnese, an only child, recalled. "It was a difficult 13 months but my Mom and I, we had each other. And I know my father was looking downon me today."
"I thank God," Farnese said. "You don't get through this without prayers."
And then Farnese thanked a lot of other people, including the judge, the jury and his lawyers.
"I thank the jury for putting their time and effort into this," he said. "I thank Judge [Cynthia] Rufe for presiding over this. I thank Mark Sheppard and Arianna Goodman who stood by me. They were amazing lawyers and they believed in me from day one."
Farnese, who, after the trial took his mother out for a late lunch at Buddakan, Third and Chestnut, barely had time to eat because his cell phone was flooded with calls from all over the state.
"All the friends that he didn't know he had, all the people who ignored him for the past 14 months because they thought he was dead, they're all calling him up now to congratulate him," a friend cracked.
Farnese's lawyers were elated.
"I'm grateful to the judge and the jury that they were able to see through this and see what I saw all along, that there was never a crime here," Mark Sheppard said.
Asked if the federal prosecutors were guilty of an overreach, Sheppard said, "They had a job to do," before adding, "Now Larry can get back to what he does best, helping people."
It was helping people that got Farnese in trouble with the feds. They viewed the scholarship that Farnese arranged through a political action committee as a bribe that bought the vote of Democratic Committeewoman Chapman in the election of a ward leader in 2011.
Farnese, who was unopposed in that election, won the job of ward leader by voice vote. Chapman wasn't even in the room when the vote went down, but the feds still believed that she had sold her vote.
During the trial, Sheppard called as a witness Lawrence J. Tabas, an expert on Pennsylvania election law. Tabas testified that it was "quite common" for candidate committees in Pennsylvania to pay for scholarships for students in their districts. Tabas then went through dozens of examples where other state legislators had done exactly that.
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Before the jury ever got the case, the judge became aware that a couple of jurors were upset because in her closing argument, one of the defense lawyers, Elizabeth Toplin, who represented Chapman, had mentioned all of the jurors' names while she was imploring them to acquit her client.
The judge's solution was to question all the jurors behind closed doors, in the presence of all the
lawyers in the case. The judge wanted to see just how upset the jurors were, and if they could remain impartial before they began deliberations. One juror who, apparently, in the view of the judge wasn't gong to be impartial, was dismissed from the jury.
And then the next day, the jury came back with their verdict of acquittal on all the charges.