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Bell corruption trial: Jurors start over after panelist dismissed

By Jeff Gottlieb
 and Corina Knoll
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After a juror was dismissed for misconduct in the Bell corruption trial, a replacement was selected and jurors will have to begin deliberations anew.

On Thursday, Superior Court Judge Kathleen Kennedy placed four ping-pong balls into a Dodgers helmet -- one for each alternate in the criminal case -- and picked one, a middle-aged woman. The alternates sat through the four-week trial but did not take part in deliberations, which began Feb. 22. Kennedy asked the jurors to set aside their past discussions and act as if their earlier deliberations had not taken place.

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Earlier Thursday, a white-haired woman known as Juror No. 3 was removed from the panel for misconduct after she revealed under questioning from the judge that she had done research on the Internet, consulted a legal website and looked up the word ‘coercion.’

The same juror had complained tearfully to the judge earlier this week that other jurors were picking on her.

Former Bell council members Luis Artiga, Victor Bello, George Cole, Teresa Jacobo, Oscar Hernandez and George Mirabal have been accused of misappropriating public funds.

They have been charged with boosting their salaries to as high as a $100,000 a year by being paid for sitting on city boards that did little if any work.

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-- Jeff Gottlieb and Corina Knoll at Los Angeles County Superior Court

L.A. Now
Jeff Gottlieb

Former Los Angeles Times staff writer Jeff Gottlieb shared the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2011 for uncovering corruption in Bell. He also received the George Polk and the Selden Ring awards, among others. He previously won a Polk award while working at the San Jose Mercury News for uncovering Stanford’s questionable spending of federal funds. He received a bachelor’s in sociology from Pitzer College in Claremont and a master’s in journalism from Columbia University.

Corina Knoll

Corina Knoll is a former reporter for the Metro section of the Los Angeles Times. She was on the team that investigated corruption in Bell — which led to the paper’s 2011 Pulitzer Prize for public service — and went on to cover the trials of the city’s former officials. She later contributed to the paper’s coverage of the San Bernardino terror attack that won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news. As a regional reporter, she wrote features about the San Gabriel Valley and the Westside. During her courts beat, she covered high-profile criminal cases and civil disputes, including the Jackson family vs AEG and Bryan Stow vs LA Dodgers. She and two colleagues investigated sheriff’s deputies whose histories of misconduct landed them on the department’s top-secret Brady list. She left The Times in January 2019. Raised in the Midwest, she is a graduate of Macalester College.

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