Jury is out in snipes tax trial

Snipes' attorney argues that if the jury knew Starr was being investigated Got a tip? TMZ Live. TMZ Sports. App Store. Not Ocala. File an indictment in Ocala and you could hand-pick not only your jury, but also your judge.

In this case, Judge William Terrell Hodges , a Richard Milhous Nixon-appointed southern judge who boasted how he never let defense attorneys ask questions to probe bias in jurors. Hodges usually sat a jury within an hour of their walking into the courtroom.

So welcome to Wesley Snipes trial — fathered by a corrupt financial advisor the government was covering up for while the financial advisor was busy robbing the last dime from elderly matrons to support his new stripper wife; judged by an all-white jury pool in a community known for racial hatred; and set before a government-hand-picked judge known for letting biased juries sit in judgment.

Corrupt prosecutions of the innocent always need treachery, a traitor, a Judas, to fill out the script. And so it was here. The government called a witness, Carmen Baker, whom Wesley Snipes had elevated to new levels of financial and professional success. Unknown to Wesley Snipes, Baker had a problem with the IRS — she had been lying on various government forms about her income.

The IRS cut the deal they always cut — they asked her to lie about Wesley Snipes, which she did on the stand. Of note, of the hundreds of employees, professionals, co-workers and employers of Wesley Snipes, how many could the IRS to find a single bad word about Wesley Snipes other than Carmen Baker? They had to coerce someone to lie, and then hide their coercion and secret deals from the jury.

And they did just that. According to what the government told the jury, Carmen Baker was crystal clean and had no tax problems ever. The government lied to the jury, and the judge rewarded the government for it. Then a YouTube video leaked from someone shocked to see what was happening. What did it expose? The two main witnesses against Wesley Snipes — Carmen Barker and Kenneth Starr — were two known liars, fraudsters and perjurers. But the judge allowed the government to hide these very facts from the jury.

The government had to use two perjurers and fraudsters to try to put an innocent man in prison. Wesley Snipes is an innocent man who should never have spent one single day in jail.

The interview delves deep into the challenges Bernhoft faced in crafting and executing his winning trial strategies. The interview starts at to ; then picks up again at and goes to The Bernhoft Law Firm, S.