Jurors in the retrial did not agree with prosecutors, who argued that the thousands of dollars Ruel Hamilton paid to Dallas City Council members were bribes.
DALLAS — A federal jury on Thursday acquitted a Dallas developer of bribery charges after a week-long retrial in which prosecutors tried to prove he sought to buy political support from two former city councilmembers.
Ruel Hamilton, 69, faced up to 25 years in prison if convicted.
“I believed in the system and the fairness of our jury,” Hamilton said of the verdict via a statement that one of his attorneys, Abbe Lowell, provided to WFAA. “My family and I are grateful to our family, friends and lawyers who stuck with us to the end.”
Hamilton’s lead attorney, Tom Melsheimer, also lauded the jury’s decision to acquit.
“Mr. Hamilton and his whole family are grateful for the jury’s service in this case,” Melsheimer told WFAA. “They saw through the weaknesses in the government’s case and reached the right result. We never believed this case should have been retried, but when we were forced to go to court, we were grateful we found 12 people who could listen to the evidence objectively.”
Four years ago, Hamilton was convicted of paying tens of thousands of dollars to former council members Dwaine Caraway and Carolyn Davis. Hamilton was sentenced to eight years in prison as a result of that verdict, but an appeals court overturned the convictions in 2022 after determining that jurors in that trial were given improper instructions.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Dallas did not immediately issue a statement after the verdicts were delivered Thursday afternoon in the courtroom of Senior U.S. District Judge Barbara Lynn, who presided over both of Hamilton’s trials.
In both the 2021 trial and the retrial, which began June 2, Hamilton’s lawyers told jurors that their client broke no laws and that any money he gave council members couple be explained as consulting fees or help paying their family medical bills.
Melsheimer said that both political outcomes that Hamilton was accused of paying for — getting paid sick leave on a ballot and getting tax credits for one of his housing complexes — never happened.
“It was a strange case to expend a lot of federal resources on,” Melsheimer told WFAA. “We got a very fair trial from Judge Lynn.”
In both trials, the prosecution’s star witness — former council member Dwaine Caraway — was sometimes less than helpful to them.
At the behest of the FBI, with whom he was cooperating in 2018, Caraway secretly recorded Hamilton giving him a $7,000 check after the two men discussed Hamilton’s desire to get an item on the city council agenda. In each time that he testified at Hamilton’s trials, Caraway denied that the check was payment for influence. Instead, Caraway, much to the chagrin of prosecutors, insisted that, although he had pleaded guilty to taking bribes from others in the past, the payment he received from Hamilton was for medical care for Caraway’s ailing mother.
Caraway was never charged for his interactions with Hamilton.
On June 3 at the retrial, while under cross examination by Melsheimer, Caraway lauded Hamilton’s devotion to improving parts of southern Dallas long neglected by other developers.
Prosecutors also sought to prove that, from 2013 to 2015, Hamilton gave more than $40,000 in cash and things of value to Carolyn Davis, who at the time was on the Dallas City Council and was the head of the city’s housing committee.
In March 2019, Davis pleaded guilty to taking the bribes, but she died in a car crash on July 15, 2019 before she could testify about any of it. She was, however, caught on wiretapped conversations recorded by the FBI discussing all the money she had taken, and how confident she was that she would never be caught for doing so. Evidence showed that while she was on council, she laundered the payments through a nonprofit, Hip Hop Government.