By the time it’s done, the number of witnesses called at the Simoes trial will barely break double digits. The prime testimony for each side will be images from a video surveillance system at La Fonda Restaurant that captured the incident between Yonkers cop Wayne Simoes and Irma Marquez.

The prosecution, led by Assistant U.S. Attorney Anna Skotko, has already shown the video six times in two days. It appears to show Simoes lifting Marquez up and then body-slamming her to the ground.

The defense is relying on 199 stills — essentially freeze-frame grabs — from the video to make its case that Simoes slipped on a wet floor and dropped Marquez. Simoes’ lawyer, Andrew Quinn has used many of the stills on cross-examination the first two days of the trial.

But Skotko turned the tables on Quinn yesterday morning, using Quinn’s best evidence to bolster the testimony of Yonkers cop John Liberatore who came under blistering cross-examination from Quinn about what he saw and when he turned away from the scene as it played out in front of him.

Liberatore said he was distracted at one point and looked out the door of the restaurant but turned back to see Simoes throw Marquez to the ground. At Marquez’s state criminal trial last year, he said he didn’t see what happened as Simoes tried to get Marquez away from her stricken niece, Anna Jacquez, who had been knocked unconscious in a barroom brawl. Quinn pointed out that Liberatore also didn’t tell Internal Affairs investigators that he saw Marquez slammed to the floor. Quinn got Liberatore to say “I confused myself” regarding his statement to Internal Affairs.

But Skotko calmly took Quinn’s stills on re-direct and used them to show the position of Liberatore’s head during the incident. The video stills appear to show Liberatore looking at Simoes and Marquez as he picks her up and then takes her to the ground.

The prosecution will rest tomorrow after calling one more witness, Liberatore’s partner, Todd Mendelson. That’ll be five witnesses total. Quinn said he intends to call five witness for the defense, with no decision yet made on whether Simoes will testify. The prosecution might call a rebuttal witness on Tuesday depending on what Quinn’s video expert says on the stand Friday.

The jury could begin its deliberations as early as Tuesday afternoon.

Sentencings scheduled for this week in a couple of closely watched federal criminal cases have been pushed off due to the Simoes trial. Judge Kenneth Karas has moved the sentencing of Paul Cote from Thursday to Monday, June 1. Cote, a former Westchester County Jail corrections officer, was convicted of violating the civil rights of inmate Zoran Teodorovic when he stomped him into a coma on Oct. 10, 2000. Teodorovic died in Dember 2001.

Cote’s federal conviction was tossed out by the late Judge Charles Brieant after he was found guilty by a federal jury in White Plains. But a federal appeals court re-instated the conviction.

Karas also moved the sentencing of Debra Ryan from Friday to Tuesday, June 9. Ryan, 45, has admitted she helped her then-boyfriend Sam Israel flee the day he was supposed to begin a 20-year prison sentence for orchestrating a $450 million hedge fund fraud — a crime that set records for white collar crime in the pre-Madoff days. It’s worth noting, as an aside, that Israel and Co.’s thievery scam amounts to less than 1 percent of Bernie Madoff’s $50 billion financial fraud.

As Assistant U.S. Attorney Benjamin Torrance was getting set to begin his opening remarks today in the Wayne Simoes trial, a steady stream of federal prosecutors, investigators, public affairs people, and support staff made their way up the two flights from the U.S. attorney’s office and into the 5th floor courtroom of Judge Kenneth Karas. 

The prosecutorial parade led one courthouse wag to wonder, “Jeez, is anybody working on the 3rd floor?”

The Wayne Simoes trial was down one juror today even before opening arguments began. One of the two alternates selected yesterday for the panel called Judge Kenneth Karas’ chambers early this morning to say her kids were sick and she couldn’t make it in for the trial. Karas seemed to view the news with a slightly raised eyebrow, noting perhaps she’d go back in the jury pool now and get assigned to a six-month RICO case. So now there’s only one alternate to go with the eight men and four women who are sitting on the jury. Judges usually select four alternates when empaneling a jury in a federal criminal trial, but because the Simoes case is expected to take just a week, only two alts were picked.

Eight men and four women will decide the fate of Yonkers cop Wayne Simoes in the federal criminal trial where he’s accused of slamming Irma Marquez to the floor of a Yonkers restaurant in March 2007.

Jury selection just ended about an hour ago in the Brieant Courthouse. 

The trial is expected to last about a week. A bespectacled Simoes joined his lawyers for every sidebar at Judge Kenneth Karas’ bench today. His wife, Julia, sat in the front row behind the defense table.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Benjamin Torrance is expected to deliver the prosecution’s opening remarks a little after 9:30 tomorrow morning.

Unlike the last trial in front of Karas which lasted five weeks, testimony in this case is expected to take five days.

Prosecutors will call just a handful of witnesses, including cops who were at the scene with Simoes, paramedics,  Marquez’s niece, and an emergency room doctor who treated Marquez for her injuries – which included a badly bruised face, a broken jaw, and a concussion. Their most important piece of evidence might be the videotape from inside La Fonda Restaurant that appears to show Simoes assaulting Marquez.

But they don’t intend to call Marquez and have declined to say why, citing a policy against discussing trial strategy.

Simoes’ star witness is expected to be a video expert who has broken the infamous security tape down frame by frame.

Time was all a judge had to do to remind jurors to avoid media coverage of a trial was warn them not to read the newspaper or watch the nightly news until the case was over.

But the explosion of all-points information via instantaneously updated social networking sites and the web in general is forcing judges to adjust their usual admonitions. The Times carried a story a couple of months back about jurors researching cases on the Internet and updating their friends about the trial via Twitter and other sites.

Today, for the first time, Judge Kenneth Karas expanded his pre-trial media warning to include the swelling universe of potential problems in keeping jurors pure. He told them to avoid media coverage of the case, as usual. But then defined media in a sort of “Jury Instruction 2.0” way.

“When I say media I mean newspapers and television news,” he said, “and Twitter and YouTube, MySpace, the whole gamut.”

So Judge Kenneth Karas is running potential jurors through the questionnaire for prospective membership on the  Wayne Simoes panel in the Brieant Courthouse a couple of hours ago. Standard questions about relatives who are cops, whether the juror or a relative was ever the victim of a crime or convicted of a crime, whether they knew any of the potential witnesses, the lawyers, or Simoes. 

All was going fine until Karas asked one man, a 62-year-old plumber from Westchester about his family. Three kids, all in school, he replied. What grade level, the judge asked the 62-year-old. Ninth, eighth “and one in kindergarten,” the proud papa replied.

“Wow, you really do have your hands full,” the judge said.

“And this was before Viagra,” the plumber replied, eliciting howls from the 49 other potential jurors as well as observers in the court.

“Now, were there any questions on the questionnaire about that?” the judge asked.

UPDATE: The plumber didn’t make the jury cut.

Westchester County Judge Rory Bellantoni is stepping down after six years on the bench, effective June 8, but his next destination has been the talk of the courthouse over the past few days.

Rumors have been swirling that Bellantoni is leaving to work for White Plains civil rights lawyer Jonathan Lovett—a controversial figure whose clients all seem to be suing the county, police departments or or some form of municipal government. I spoke to Lovett this morning and he insisted that Bellantoni will NOT be working for his small law firm. Bellantoni won’t return my calls, so Lovett’s word is the only thing I have right now.

Bellantoni, a Republican, apparently is leaving over money. In his resignation letter, he said the lack of judicial pay raises has caused economic hardships on Bellantoni’s family, according to Administrative Judge Francis Nicolai. 

County and state judges make $136,700 a year. They haven’t received` a raise in 10 years.

Bellantoni made headlines in October when he exonerated Richard DiGuglielmo, who had spent 10 years in prison on a murder conviction in the shooting death of Charles Campbell of Dobbs Ferry. Bellantoni threw out the conviction after a hearing in which an eyewitness to the shooting recanted his trial testimony. In his decision, Bellantoni said Dobbs Ferry police coerced witness Michael Dillon to change his story and blasted the Westchester District Attorney’s office in a bizarre “Wizard of Oz” reference, comparing Dillon to Dorothy Gale and authorities to the wizard behind the curtain.

Bellantoni, who had been the presiding judge of sex offender court, was reassigned to civil court a few months ago – shortly after the DiGuglielmo decision – and was made an acting state Supreme Court justice. Nicolai said he needed another judge to hear civil cases in the 9th Judicial District, which includes Westchester, Rockland, Putnam, Orange and Dutchess counties.

Bellantoni’s decision means he won’t be following in the steps of his father, Orazio Bellantoni, who has been on the bench for 25 years.

Jury selection has begun in the federal criminal trial of Yonkers cop Wayne Simoes. The eight-year veteran of the YPD is accused of body-slamming 44-year-old Irma Marquez face-first to the ground of LaFonda Restaurant in March 3, 2007. The selection of the 12 member panel plus four alternates expected to last at least the rest of the day. Judge Kenneth Karas indicated he was looking at tomorrow morning for opening arguments. Assistant U.S. Attorney Anna Skotko said she expects to call between six and nine witnesses in the trial that should last about a week. Simoes’ defense contends that he did not slam Marquez to the floor but that he dropped her.

Judge Catherine Bartlett has not held court for the past two weeks and has not scheduled any cases for the next few weeks.

The Orange County lawyer, an appointed state Court of Claims judge, remains assigned to Rockland County Courthouse, but has taken time off for a medical procedure, said Judge Francis Nicolai, the administrative law judge for the 9th Judicial District, which includes Rockland.

Nicolai said he expects Bartlett back behind the bench in a few weeks, possibly sooner than her blank calendar of cases on the court wwebsite indicated.

Nicolai assigned Bartlett  to handle criminal cases in Rockland. An appointee by former GOP Gov. George Pataki to a 10-year-term whose husband is the Orange County GOP chairman, Bartlett also has been designated an acting state Supreme Court judge. She’s a former county attorney and Goshen judge.

“I know she was planning on being out for a minor medical procedure,” Nicolai told The Journal-News today. “I am sure she will be back sooner than expected.”