Adapted from the Times Herald Record
by Heather Yakin, December 18, 2010
GOSHEN — A jury has acquitted a Monroe woman on charges of leaking grand jury information to a drug suspect.
The jury deliberated Thursday afternoon and Friday morning before clearing Jill Giunta, 23, of unlawful grand jury disclosure and reckless endangerment, felonies, and obstructing governmental administration, a misdemeanor.
Giunta was one of the Orange County area residents who answered a jury duty summons last year and was chosen to sit on a special grand jury convened by the state attorney general's office. The grand jury heard evidence in a massive two-year investigation by the attorney general's Organized Crime Task Force, looking into sales of marijuana, cocaine and pills in Orange County.
Ultimately, 44 people were arrested based on a web of information from wiretaps, informants and the like. 43 of those charged ultimately entered guilty pleas.
Giunta, who's been free without bail, attended each day of the trial accompanied by family members. "She wept," Giunta's lawyer, Ben Ostrer, said of the verdict. "She thanked the jury" and quickly left the courthouse.
The attorney general's office did not return a call for comment. This trial represents the first acquittal at trial in a case brought by Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's Organized Crime Task Force.
Giunta was accused of telling Paul Crawford of New Windsor that he was a target of investigators.
During the trial, Ostrer said there were myriad possible sources for the leak — but despite the resources that the attorney general poured into the drug probe, the only evidence presented against Giunta was Crawford's claim that she told him. Crawford and Giunta were acquainted because they both worked at Woodbury Common Premium Outlets. Crawford, who had a prior felony conviction, got a minimal prison sentence in the drug case.
In fact, Ostrer said Friday, the heaviest sentence imposed in the case was against Eirik Certo, who got three years in prison. Another defendant, who was the confidential informant, got time served on a Dutchess County bust for a top-level drug felony and the charges dismissed in the attorney general's case, Ostrer added.
Ostrer said in Giunta's case, the jury was ultimately swayed, he said, by a lack of corroboration for Crawford's claim.
If his claim had been true, Ostrer said, "with all the resources they had, there should have been something."
