By Suzanne Ma
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN – Defense lawyers for Brooke Astor’s son appealed his conviction on Monday, arguing that Anthony Marshall was deprived of his fundamental right to trial by an impartial jury.
New evidence has surfaced that alleges one of the jurors voted to convict because another juror intimidated her.
Last year, a jury found Marshall, 85, and co-conspirator Francis Morrissey guilty of defrauding socialite Brooke Astor out of tens of millions of dollars. The two were sentenced last October after a five-month trial in Manhattan Supreme Court.
But now, a lone juror has stepped forward with an affidavit that could overturn that sentence.
"I don’t want to see anyone innocent go away, but I had to do what I had to do," Judith DeMarco said in the affidavit.
"The judge wasn’t going to protect me. At the end I’m ashamed I couldn’t stand my ground. But I couldn’t take it any longer. I'm not proud of it. I'm not proud of what I did."
DeMarco told lawyers she was threatened by juror Yvonne Fernandez, who allegedly told DeMarco she once dated a member of the Latin Kings.
DeMarco, a legal analyst for Bloomberg News, claimed Fernandez approached her flashing gang signs and had to be restrained by other jurors, the paper said.
But on Monday, Fernandez vehemently denied the allegations in an interview with the New York Post.
"She said something that infuriated me," Fernandez explained.
"She said, 'The judge's instructions don't do it for me,'" said Fernandez, who remembers her shock given that DeMarco is an attorney who works as a legislative researcher for Mayor Michael Bloomberg's communications company.
Fernandez said she believed DeMarco was willfully rejecting the judge's interpretation of their obligations under the law.
"She said it twice. I was so shocked I wrote it down in my pad. 'The judge's instructions don't do it for me.'"
"I shouted, 'How in the world can we deliberate if the judge's instructions don't do it for you?"
Fernandez said she later apologized for yelling at DeMarco, but denies ever flashing gang signs at her.
"I don't even know any gang signs!" she told the Post, adding that she and DeMarco had become close friends during the six-month trial.
"She met my mother. I met her boyfriend. She had a very good sense of who I am."
Fernandez said she told DeMarco of the time when she was 16 years old and had briefly dated "the president of the Latin Kings." That was 35 years ago.
"I'm 52," Fernandez told the Post. "I have a good job, a beautiful home. It's crazy that she said I came at her with gang signs. Now, my name's out there that I was 'menacing' and I was restrained and that is just so false."
The appeal also relies on dozens of internal e-mails exchanged among jurors after the verdict, in which members of the jury collude with one another over how they described their deliberations to the press.
Marshall has been free on bail since his sentencing in December. His lawyer argued that sending him to prison for up to three years would amount to a death sentence given his age and frail health.
Marshall and and his co-defendant, Francis Morrissey, were convicted of taking advantage of socialite and philanthropist Brooke Astor's deteriorating health to siphon tens of millions from her estate. Astor died in 2007 at the age of 105.
