“Pure speculation, and offered just for thought purposes only.
Minimally I would think each person would take 40 min to 1 hour to
express their opinions unless it’s a slam dunk either direction
Give the up to 1 hour that’s 6 and i don’t think we will see them stay
later than 11 pm tonight.
Even then they may just decide ok, we have a verdict, let’s sleep on it
and finalize this in the AM.”
All quite true.
I remember the OJ jurors said something like they already had their minds made up, and they were just stalling time and asked for some evidence so they wouldn’t come with it too quickly.
Agree that they probably won’t have a verdict tonight - they recognize they don’t want to be painted as an OJ jury.
I sat on a murder trial jury in California long ago, what amazed me with that jury was we went into the room, decided on a foreman, and then took a quick vote. I was one of 2 on the jury that actually had some reservations and wanted to consider things - after a week long trial a lot of them just wanted to call the guy guilty and go home. We did go over several items, including a hospital report that had been put into evidence for an injury the defendant had sometime before and was being used by the defense as an explanation for the minute spots of blood on his shirt (this was before DNA testing that would have nailed the guy today - the expert could only say it was human as I recollect - another argument was it was from a chicken). What was interesting was that the prosecution had made a point during the trial of showing the assailant was left handed by the way the knife attack occurred, but never made a connection to the defendant. The hospital report, however, discussed him injuring his left arm when he was breaking into a window - every indication was that he was in fact left handed. This kind of tipped things for me, there was a lot of issues and “reasonable doubt” was a key concern, but we had a good discussion and a couple of more votes before all were in agreement on guilty. There were a lot of issues, and I often wondered if the defense attorney public defender knew he was guilty and let things in that we were able to view in deliberations.
I hope the jury is going to take their time and come to the correct conclusion that there is definitely reasonable doubt in this case. Much more than reasonable doubt. But hopefully consideration will help quell the anger as not being too quick a decision for innocence. Frankly a verdict late Friday night could be disastrous - much better Monday mid-morning so things settle down through daylight hours.