Law&Crime Sidebar - Attorney for P. Diddy’s Sons Says Trafficking Raid Coverage Could Taint Future Jury Pool

Episode Date: April 7, 2024

Jeffrey Lichtman, who is representing Sean “P. Diddy” Combs’ two sons Justin and Christian following federal raids on Combs’ homes, believes the high-profile nature of the case could create problems during any future criminal case. Law&Crime’s Jesse Weber sits down with jury consultant Alan Tuerkheimer to discuss what could happen during jury selection if the rapper is charged.HOST:Jesse Weber: https://twitter.com/jessecordweberLAW&CRIME SIDEBAR PRODUCTION:YouTube Management - Bobby SzokeVideo Editing - Michael DeiningerScript Writing & Producing - Savannah WilliamsonGuest Booking - Alyssa Fisher & Diane KayeSocial Media Management - Vanessa BeinSTAY UP-TO-DATE WITH THE LAW&CRIME NETWORK:Watch Law&Crime Network on YouTubeTV: https://bit.ly/3td2e3yWhere To Watch Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3akxLK5Sign Up For Law&Crime's Daily Newsletter: https://bit.ly/LawandCrimeNewsletterRead Fascinating Articles From Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3td2IqoLAW&CRIME NETWORK SOCIAL MEDIA:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lawandcrime/Twitter: https://twitter.com/LawCrimeNetworkFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/lawandcrimeTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/lawandcrimenetworkTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lawandcrimeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of this Law and Crimes series ad-free right now. Join Wondry Plus in the Wondery app Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Agent Nate Russo returns in Oracle 3, Murder at the Grandview, the latest installment of the gripping Audible Original series. When a reunion at an abandoned island hotel turns deadly, Russo must untangle accident from murder. But beware, something sinister lurks in the grand. View Shadows. Joshua Jackson delivers a bone-chilling performance in this supernatural thriller that

will keep you on the edge of your seat. Don't let your fears take hold of you as you dive into this addictive series. Love thrillers with a paranormal twist? The entire Oracle trilogy is available on Audible. Listen now on Audible. If Sean Combs is actually criminally charged and goes to trial, what would his jury look like? Could he get a fair and impartial jury? The new attorney representing his son has reservations about that. We're going to discuss that and a lot more with jury consultant Alan Turkheimer. Welcome to Sidebar, presented by Law and Crime. I'm Jesse Weber.

Well, there's something we haven't really talked about much when it comes to the Sean Diddy Combs saga. You know what that is? The jury. Now, you might be saying, and should be saying, what are you talking about, Jesse? Combs hasn't been criminally charged. He hasn't been hit with any crimes yet. And you know what?

You are correct. However, I am not the one to bring this up. No, someone connected to this case did, and that raises a very interesting question for us about a potential jury. Let me explain. So as we've been covering here on Sidebar, the rapper, producer, entertainment mogul, he has been hit with massive bombshell lawsuits in the past several months, accusing him of sex trafficking, rape, illegal drug, and firearms possession,

involvement in shootings. And just last week, two of his properties in L.A. and Miami were raided by federal agents, more specifically, Homeland Security. Now, Combs' sons, Justin and Christian, they were placed in handcuffs, they were detained, they weren't arrested during these raids. And by the way, Combs, and neither Combs nor his sons, they have not been arrested or charged, even though reporting indicates these raids are pursuant to an ongoing investigation, possibly into sex trafficking, purportedly by the U.S. Attorney's Office from the Southern District

of New York. These are the feds, and a lot of our analysts have said that charges could be forthcoming. Having said that, Jeffrey Lickman, the famed defense attorney who represented Joaquin El Chapo Guzman, John Gotti Jr., rappers the Game, Fat Joe, it is being reported that he is now representing Justin, Justin, and Justin and Christian, by the way, they were both named in the Rodney Jones lawsuit. This was the lawsuit filed by Diddy's former producer, but. I should tell you that in the latest news,

Christian Combs has been hit with a lawsuit of his own, that a woman claims that she was drugged and sexually abused by Christian Combs. We have a sidebar coming out about that, too. Justin, though, was sued as a defendant by Jones, claimed that he was involved in sex trafficking, that he was involved in a shooting from 2022. Now, Lickman has been very critical of these raids, particularly the level of militarized force that was used.

You had armed agents, vehicles. It was a scene. So on Lickman's podcast, beyond the legal limit, he talks about the raid saying, quote, the government is not always good and not always honest and doesn't always play by the rules. In fact, it oftentimes does not play by the rules. He goes on to say, what bothers me the most about it is not so much the search, the overboard search that occurred on Puff Daddy's two homes, but the fact that the press was certainly told about it either immediately or right before.

He goes on to say, quote, they were all there, ready to record it. They were all there, told about it, and breathlessly reporting what anonymous agents of law enforcement are telling them about what they're looking for, evidence of sex trafficking. That's bad because that's just an evil thing for our government or law enforcement to do. But here is the kicker. Let's listen to what he had to say about a jury. By using the press to leak what they're looking for, they're just dirtying. a potentially future jury pool. I mean, they use the press to smear, puff daddy, Sean Combs,

for one reason to deny him a fair trial, to turn public opinion against him. That's un-American. So that seems to me to be an acknowledgement that a jury is a possibility, that potential charges are a possibility. And that got me thinking, what about a jury in a potential prosecution of Diddy?

What would that even look like? for that. Let me bring on renowned expert, renowned jury consultant, attorney, psychologist, Alan, Terkheimer. Alan's so good to see you. I don't remember the last time you were on Cybor. If this is your premier episode of Cybar, I apologize. I don't remember, but it's good to see you. You know what? I was a while ago. You were? It was too long. Yeah. It was too long. Yeah, it's been a long time. It's always too long. Well, I'm glad to have you here. So first, before we even get into what a potential did he jury? could look like, okay? Talk me about what you made of Lickman's comments. Well, Lickman's certainly

a brawler. He's a fighter. You look at some of the defendants that he's represented and he's going to get started. He's not going to waste any time. He's not going to hold back. And he wants to, in my mind, put out this counter-narrative and start the process going of, hey, look, this is, the government's bad. They overreached. My client is not guilty. And so he's He's just not wasting any time doing it, and he's looking down the road way down the road because it seems like it'll be a long time before a jury would get a case if there's charges and a trial and whatnot. But he's a planner.

He's playing the long game, and so I think he just wants to get the position out that, hey, this isn't fair. Well, is he right that the level of these raids and the media attention on these raids could taint a future jury pool for Combs and his sons if they are ultimately criminally charged? I don't think that's the case. I think a lot has to happen, and there's a lot of safeguards that are built in place to keep this from happening. Now, if you fast forward and look at the whole process, jurors are going to forget, or potential jurors are going to forget. Now, even if they, even if they watch this, but so a lot of the jury.

You think so? You think they'd really forget this? It's in the news constantly. It was a big deal. By the time a jury selected, whenever that would be, I think maybe they'll have some recollection. of it, but my experience is that jurors would say, yeah, I kind of remember he was arrested, but I don't think they would remember what it exactly looked like and what went down. And also, I think jurors, and this is a Southern District jury, they'll draw jurors from

the New York County, the Bronx, but then also some of the outline counties, Putnam, Rockland, and Westchester. And a lot of jurors that come from those counties, they're not paying close attention to it. And even if some jurors in those counties know a little bit about it or read something about it, by the time trial comes around, there's so many hurdles that have to be overcome for a judge to say, okay, you can't be fair and impartial. You can't serve. By the way, just speculating here, let's say he is arrested and criminally charged within the next six months, okay?

When would you see a trial? How long would it be? A federal trial. So much of that, yeah, it would be another significant period of time after that months and months because so much has to take place with the interviews and the questioning and getting everybody ready and lined up. And, of course, the defense can make motions and everything takes time. So it could be another six months, could be up to a year. I don't know. I think a lot of it just depends on the judge that would be on the case.

And it wouldn't happen quickly. I mean, in this other district, some cases get streamlined, but out of fairness of the defense, there's a lot of motions that would take place and a lot of, I think, time would be spent making sure that they did it right and didn't just run this ram shot, rough shot through the process. Let me ask you this, though, the allegation that Lickman makes that the government was coordinating with the media, even if that is not true, is that an argument that he could make when it comes to jury selection you could say to the say to the judge that look at all this attention and you have to you have to support it with facts you can't just say this was on the news a lot i think that's

what what his team would have to do is they'd have to hire someone to study the venue and there's those people to do this there's jury consultants do this they look at a venue they do surveys and they reach a swath of the of the veneer and ask them what they know about the case and whether or not they formed an opinion, and then whether or not they could let go of that opinion and give P. Diddy, Sean Combs, a fair and a partial look at the evidence. And I think there's a good chance that they could do that. You mentioned this a little bit, but talk to me about what would a federal jury selection process look like. Again, assuming Combs and or his sons are criminally charged, they're hit with federal charges in the Southern District, what would

a federal jury selection process look like? Very different from state court. It's going to be very different from what we're going to see in a couple of weeks with Trump's trial in Manhattan because unlike in Manhattan in a state case where lawyers get to ask the questions and get to deeply probe the individuals who could potentially serve on a jury. That's usually not the case at a federal trial. Now, the judges have some discretion in a case like this, I think it's going to

going to be clear that the jurors do have to be asked in depth about what they know about the case and what their attitudes are, whether or not they made up their minds. But it's not going to take as long as a state case would be. So the judge will either be right there involved or at least somebody in the court and will go through the jurors and I'll just have to flat out ask them what they know about the case, whether they've formed an opinion and whether or not they can set that aside. So it could be streamlined. The Southern District can be unpredictable. You can pick a jury can take a week to pick a jury or a judge can just say we're picking a jury and we're doing openings tomorrow and it could be a day. So there's a lot of...

You mentioned the different counties. Where would they go to get a jury pool? How would they send out summons? Would they do some sort of questionnaire before they even bring jurors in for voir dire? I would think so, yes. So they would, now this is, a lot of the jurors are going to come from New York County and Bronx County, but then some are going to come from the some of the outlying counties like Westchester and Rockland and Putnam. But either way, I think the best thing to do would be to send out maybe 500 to maybe even 750 questionnaires so that they get a sense of somebody, the people that have followed it closely have made up their minds and maybe they've embraced Lickman's perspective and just around their questionnaire they write.

this is a witch hunt. I know that's maybe not for this case, but this is the government's overreaching and it's unfair. P.D.D. is being persecuted. Or on the other end, they would say things on flattering up Sean Combs. Those jurors then, if they fill out a questionnaire ahead of time, then most likely would not be invited to the next phase, whereas if you send out 500 questionnaires, maybe 125, then end up getting called in. They don't know that much about the case. They have made up their mind. And then they start. or in-depth questioning at person. And to reach them, I think this was part of your question.

It's usually, for my understanding, either voter registration or state ID, their voter rolls from the DMV, also they can get information on who to call in. So let's say you get jurors brought into court and you have both sides question them during the voir dire process, right? What kind of questions would they be asked by the government and what kind of questions would they be asked by Combs' defense attorneys? Sure. So you're going to ask, both sides are going to want some general questions asked of the participants. They want to know who they are, how they think, what kind of juror they're going to be, and they're also going to ask some pretty case-specific questions about this matter. Now, the general ones are just about what do they think about prosecutions in general, about the government. The government has to worry about people who are skeptical of charges, people who are very pro-defendant, maybe just, just, think that the government does tend to overreach in line with what Lickman was saying. And then the defense is going to worry about people who think that, well, there's smoke, there's fire.

Do they think that whenever there's a prosecution of somebody, a crime was probably committed? And then they're going to also get into the case specifics. They're going to ask about some very personal stuff about being a victim of sexual assault, of sex crimes. Does this ever happen to you or someone close to you? And it doesn't necessarily indicate if somebody's, somebody's going to be good for the prosecution or bad, but it's probably not a good case they should sit on. And somebody might, you might think that if somebody's a victim of sexual assault,

the defense would not want that person there because it matches the allegations. That's probably generally true. Sometimes if you're a victim of something, you see yourself differently as another victim in a circumstance. But that's going to be a large part of the case-specific probing that takes place about their experiences and maybe even some attitudes about sexual assault. Is it, do they think it's more prevalent than it gets reported? Is it underreported? It'll be very interesting to hear the word to hear in this case.

I agree. And do you think that the backgrounds of the jurors would be important for either the government or Combs in terms of education, in terms of socioeconomic status, in terms of profession? You know, who would the government maybe prefer and who would Combs more prefer? Yeah, it's good to know and get a good picture of what. makes the juror tick and certainly their backgrounds and their education does it's a pretty educated venue so a lot of jurors in the southern district have bachelor's degrees graduate degrees and i guess each side has to figure out all right how do we win is the is it better for the prosecution to have

detail-oriented jurors or is it better to have big picture jurors and then they can say all right well if somebody's an engineer they're pretty mechanical and this is how they think about things versus somebody who's maybe a social worker and this is how the social worker would assess things so yes as it gets close they're going to look at they're going to scrutinize all the jurors they're going to not only be able to look at the questionnaire responses and ask some questions but they're going to have teams on both sides that are going to dig into the social media backgrounds to see what they're posting if they posted on if not just this if they posted on anything about sexual assault or the me too movement or jdie or yeah exactly or

Diddy, and anything that gets them more information so they can have a better sense of who they want to strike. And let me be very clear about this. So Combs, neither Combs nor a sentence, they have not been criminally charged. We did an episode, a previous sidebar, about what potential charges could look like. And obviously, there are comparisons based on the allegations, based on what we're hearing from the raids. There are comparisons between what a potential federal prosecution of Diddy would look like compared

to R. Kelly. And the reason I say that is because R. Kelly was prosecuted federally in New York. If you can, do you remember what some of the challenges were in the Kelly jury selection process or how that might be compared to what a ditty jury selection process would be like? If I recall correctly, I think they were able to move through it pretty efficiently. I don't remember the major stumbling blocks or hurdles in that case. I'm sure that some of them existed I'm sure the defense would point that out

do you recall what? The reason I ask is because you had such a high profile individual who was accused of heinous heinous crimes and in the same way where Diddy has been in pop culture he's been in the music industry for decades I see these kind of similarities and I guess

the main question I have to ask you Alan is do you think Sean Combs if he's criminally charged can get a fair an impartial jury? The answer to that is yes. I think there's so many factors built into the process that ultimately when you start with setting up these questionnaires, whether it's 500 or 700 or 800, then you winnow it down

by the time you get to the jurors who come in for questioning, ultimately you're going to see jurors in the box who I think both sides would have to agree. And the judge too can be fair and impartial. So I do think he can get a fair shake. And you're right, the R. Kelly trial, I just think that also both sides have to be aware of, they're going to have to tell the jurors and voir dire somehow convey to them that you're going to hear some pretty specific allegations. Some are very graphic and hard to understand and grasp just because of the sexual nature. And you might get some jurors that just say, I can't do this.

Even if it's not an experience that they personally had, it's just not for everybody. And how long it could take, right? If you're dealing with a racketeering or sex trafficking case, those. can take some time and can jurors take that time off? Right. Well, that's the thing. I mean, you want, I think both sides probably, but usually there's one of the sides versus the other maybe more so, but you want people who can pay attention to the evidence that

are going to listen, follow along. You want generally productive members of society. And if you're a productive member of society, it's not the easiest thing to take six months off. Each side has to look out for a stealth juror trying to get on the case to influence the jury. in a way that they have a predetermined outcome in mind. So that's something they should also watch out for. If somebody thinks, hey, I'm going to be the one that saves Sean Combs,

then I want on this jury, or from the prosecution standpoint, you might have pro-prosecution jurors and say, oh, this is despicable, and I'm going to get on there. I'm going to make sure that he goes to jail. And that's why you have to really do a very thorough analysis of the questions. You ask these jurors, do a background on these jurors to find out who they are. But we're not at that point yet. again this is still the investigation we do not know what role combs or his sons play in this

whatsoever uh but we will wait and see allan turkheimer thank you so much always fun thank you jesse all right everybody that is all we have for you right now here on sidebar thank you so much for joining us as always please subscribe on apple podcast spotify youtube wherever you get your podcast i'm jesse weber i'll speak to you next time You can binge all episodes of this law and crime series ad free right now on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.