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Extracted Text (OCR)
Case 1:20-cr-00330-PAE Document 204 _ Filed 04/16/21 Page 226 of 239
available grand jury that day, due to the global pandemic®*—“was a deviation from the established
practice of indicting defendants in the division where the offense is alleged to have occurred and
where the case will be tried.” (Def. Mot. 9 at 2). Because the offense is alleged to have occurred
in the “Manhattan Division” and the defendant assumes that her jury trial will occur there too, she
eee
argues that the “appropriate comparison,” for the purpose of her fair cross-section claim, “‘is
therefore between the Manhattan Division and the qualified wheel for White Plains.” (Def. Mot.
9 at 6). This premise is faulty.
“Tt is well-settled that neither the jury selection statute nor the Constitution requires that
jurors be drawn from an entire district.” Bahna, 68 F.3d at 24 (collecting cases); see also United
States v. Plaza-Andrades, 507 F. App’x 22, 26 (2d Cir. 2013) (“[O]ur precedent makes clear that
the Sixth Amendment does not entitle a defendant to be tried in a geographic location any more
®8 This case was indicted on June 29, 2020, on which date the grand jury sitting in White Plains
was the only available grand jury in the District. Beginning on or about June 25, 2020, grand jury
quorums returned in Manhattan, but with substantially less availability than before the pandemic.
As a result, the Government has sought indictments from grand juries sitting in White Plains and
Manhattan, as availability permits. In this instance, the Government was prepared to indict on
June 29, 2020, and the only grand jury available in this District on that day sat in White Plains.
The global pandemic’s effect on grand jury availability continues to evolve, but at no point have
grand juries in White Plains or Manhattan resumed normal activity.
The defendant speculates that the Government sought an indictment on June 29, 2020
because of some arbitrary desire to arrest the defendant on July 2, 2020, one year to the day after
a grand jury returned a sealed indictment charging Jeffrey Epstein with federal crimes on July 2,
2019. (See, e.g., Def. Mot. 9 at 1, 8). Setting aside the silliness of marking the anniversary of an
indictment’s return, as opposed to the anniversary of the arrest itself, which took place on July 6,
2019, there is no reality in the defense’s conspiracy theories. As the defense knows full well, the
Government attempted to locate and arrest the defendant on July 1, 2020 but was unable to confirm
her location until obtaining cellphone location data identifying her location and enabling her arrest
on July 2, 2020. The defense knows this because they have the warrant application that the
Government submitted on July 1, 2020 for the defendant’s cellphone location information, in
which the Government stated that it had been unable to confirm the defendant’s location. In other
words, the Government indicted the defendant as soon as it was prepared to present the evidence
it had gathered to a grand jury, and the Government arrested the defendant as soon as it was able
to locate her after obtaining that indictment.
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Document Details
| Filename | DOJ-OGR-00003160.jpg |
| File Size | 990.4 KB |
| OCR Confidence | 94.5% |
| Has Readable Text | Yes |
| Text Length | 3,163 characters |
| Indexed | 2026-02-03 16:31:39.848738 |