Shy jury keeps deliberating |
 |
||||||
|
|||||||
SAN DIEGO — Jurors weighing David Westerfield's fate finished a third day of deliberations Monday with a request for the media — stop staring at us. The plea, relayed through a court officer, came after the panel took an afternoon coffee break in a public hallway. As they had in the past, reporters watched the 12 as they chatted around a picnic table, but the prying eyes apparently became too much for some jurors who asked bailiffs to step in. Five minutes after they returned to the jury room, a court officer told journalists to cease further "peeking" at the panel. The six men and six women have spent 12 hours deliberating charges of murder, kidnapping and child pornography against Westerfield in connection with the slaying of Danielle van Dam, his 7-year-old neighbor. If convicted, Westerfield faces the death penalty. Beside their picnic table conviviality, jurors have offered little clues to their progress. The only note from the panel concerned jurors' wish to deliberate five days a week instead of four. One Los Angeles radio station expressed frustration with the pace of deliberations Monday by handing out broccoli spears and fliers reading, "Save the justice system...Chop down the Broccoli stocks (sic)." Employees of KFI AM, which bills itself as "more stimulating talk radio," said "broccoli heads" were holdout jurors who favored acquittal. Elsewhere in the San Diego courthouse Monday, another jury handed a convicted killer a death sentence for murdering and raping his roommate. Calvin Parker, 33, was the first person sentenced to death in the city since November 1999 when a jury sent child-killer Brandon Wilson to death row. In that trial, broadcast on Court TV, Wilson promised jurors that he would kill again if he wasn't executed. |
|||||||
