Why is the Manafort jury taking so long to reach a verdict?

After four days of deliberation, jurors in Paul Manafort’s criminal trial had more questions for the presiding judge Tuesday. And increasingly, some lay observers have a question for the jury: What is taking you so long? In today’s hyperactive media environment, four days seems like an eternity—particularly given that cable news partisans all seemed to reach their own verdicts before the trial had even begun. And Manafort’s lawyers have fueled speculation about the deliberations, suggesting the lack of an instantaneous verdict is good news for their client. Even some longtime defenders of special counsel Robert Mueller have privately fretted that the case might be in danger. But among seasoned legal experts, length of time the jurors are taking really surprises no one. Some legal experts say a jury can take a day for each day of the trial. Under that scenario, the jury that heard 12 days of arguments and testimony would be done on Aug. 31, assuming they keep deliberating at this current pace. Others say a jury needs one hour for each count. By that calculation, the jury examining 18 counts would be done around today. “Bottom line, the trial lawyers may be posturing in offering their theories, but they don't have any better idea what the length of the deliberations signifies than does a random law student who has not even followed the trial,” said Philip Lacovara, a former U.S. deputy solicitor general who worked on the Watergate investigation. There are plenty of good reasons why the jury wasn’t able to reach the quick verdict that the dozens of increasingly bored reporters here had been rooting for. For starters, the six men and six women from Northern Virginia face plenty of constraints as they consider Manafort’s guilt or innocence. They can’t Google anything. Phoning a friend is strictly verboten. They don’t even have immediate access to the 2,500 pages of transcripts from the trial. Instead, they’re limited to the nearly 400 exhibits – emails, bank invoices, tax documents – introduced in the case, plus whatever they might have scribbled into the court-issued notebooks they’ve been using each day. They can also consult a cassette recorder—yes, you read that right—with a nearly two-hour recording of the judge’s verbal instructions. When the jurors asked Ellis last week for definitions on some of the key terms at the core of the Manafort case, the judge said no dice. Use your recollections, he instructed them. In their note Tuesday, jurors asked for guidance on addressing a lack of consensus on at least one count — triggering yet more speculation about whether a verdict might be in sight. For the dozens of reporters and veteran legal eagles following the case, the jurors are the focus of endless opining. Everyone has a theory, even if there is no reliable science behind sizing up a jury’s intent. Some saw good signs for Mueller when the jurors asked at the start of their deliberations for a larger room to do their work. “This is very good news for the USA,” said Gene Rossi, a former federal prosecutor. “The more they look, the guiltier he looks.” But the jurors’ questions posed last Thursday introduced several competing tea leaves. Their query about the legal requirements for an American to report a foreign bank account report suggested they were deep in the weeds of the case. It also suggested they’d perhaps advanced beyond the charges against Manafort dealing with filing false tax returns, the first ones listed on the Mueller indictment. Still another question from the jurors -- asking for help with a map of some kind directly connecting the exhibits presented to them with the charges – may have signaled they were having trouble getting a handle on everything in front of them. That didn’t bode well for a speedy resolution. Legal experts also have suggested studying the jury’s body language. On Monday, the 12 all sat together in a group clustered as close as they could to Ellis, rather than spread out like they had in the jury box’s extra seats during the trial. But by Tuesday the signs were slightly different. When the jurors came into the courtroom as court convened in the morning, one man dressed casually in a black hoodie sat one seat apart from the rest. He took up the same position at a midday hearing to discuss the jury’s latest question. The jurors appear to have established some bonds. At least three of them have been spotted outside the courthouse taking smoke breaks – a sign perhaps that they’re stressed or not moving quick to get their work done (the jury is only supposed to work when all 12 are in the same room). They also appear to have a good rapport with the courtroom security officer who escorts them to and from their ninth-floor conference room. “You’re on,” he told the jurors last week just before they entered the room during the final stages of the trial. Rossi, who as an assistant U.S. attorney in Virginia tried seven cases before Ellis and made hundreds of appearances before the judge, said the pace of the Manafort jury deliberations is “perfectly normal.” “This jury knows the world is watching,” he said. “They want to do it right. Read every exhibit. Discuss every witness. Apply the jury instructions. This takes time in a complex tax and bank fraud case. I know of a jury that deliberated for close to two months. Three full days are nothing. Period." Ellis may have made the deliberations even longer “by his efforts to hurry along with the trial,” said Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney from the Eastern District of Michigan who was in the courtroom for the first half of the trial. McQuade noted that the judge repeatedly chided lawyers to move their presentations faster and refused Mueller’s requests to publicly display exhibits while witnesses were testifying about them, saying insteadthat the jury could look at them later. “In a case as complicated as this, it can be difficult for the jury to recollect which exhibits went with which witness or which scheme,” she said. “They must now review their notes and dig through more than 400 exhibits to match them up to counts. I think that any time the judge saved during the trial by refusing to allow the prosecution to publish exhibits is being given back in deliberations and then some.” Recent history does show examples of swift verdicts in high-profile political cases. A Washington D.C. jury took just three days to reach a verdict -- on New Year’s Day -- in 1975 in the Watergate cover-up case before convicting former several top Nixon administration officials, including Attorney General John Mitchell, former White House chief of staff H.R. Halderman, former White House domestic adviser John Ehrlichman. It took another Washington jury 10 days to deliberate in 2007 before convicting the George W. Bush White House official I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby for lying about his role in the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plane’s identity. In Little Rock, Ken Starr’s Whitewater prosecutors needed eight days of jury deliberations in 1996 to secure guilty verdicts in his fraud case against Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker and two of then-President Bill Clinton’s former business partners. That case had 19 counts against Jim McDougal. (he was found guilty on 18); plus four more against his ex-wife, Susan McDougal, while Tucker was convicted of two of the seven charges he faces. Lengthy deliberation are also not uncommon in complex fraud cases involving high-profile or politically-active defendants. In 1995, a federal jury in Alexandria was out for seven days before convicting the former president of United Way of America, William Aramony, on 25 of 27 charges he faced. A judge dismissed some other charges after the prosecution presented its side. As in the Manafort case, the judge would not let prosecutors discuss documents in detail, which led to jurors poring over voluminous exhibits in the jury room. Also as in the Manafort case, Aramony’s defense called no witnesses. Four days of jury deliberations in the trial of Washington state auditor Troy Kelley in 2016 on money laundering, fraud, tax offenses and false statements charges ended with a deadlock on 14 of 15 counts. Federal prosecutors retried the case in a three-week trial last December, with a jury taking just two days to return convictions on nine counts and acquittals on five others. Stephanie Murray contributed to this report. source: https://ift.tt/2BufZlU #Headlines by: jgerstein@politico.com (Josh Gerstein) Original Post: https://ift.tt/2BufZlU https://ift.tt/2whCDZ2
source: https://droolindognews.blogspot.com/2018/08/why-is-manafort-jury-taking-so-long-to.html