The jury in the Phil Spector murder trial still can't reach a unanimous verdict, with either five or seven of the jurors sure that Phil Spector is innocent – beating our estimate of people who think he's innocent by either five or seven.
Yesterday at the Phil Spector murder trial, the jury showed up in court to admit that – after one week of deliberations and four ballots – they still haven't been able to come to a unanimous decision about whether Phil Spector murdered Lana Clarkson by shooting her in the face or not. Now the judge in charge of the Phil Spector murder trial is toying with the idea of letting the lawyers reargue some of their points, or even letting the jury consider a manslaughter charge to get them to hurry up. But, hey, you fill the deliberation room with all sorts of delicious pastries, you get a hung jury – any old fool knows that.
The responsibility that the jury in the Phil Spector murder trial has is enormous – in a case with no real scientific evidence either way, all that really stands between sending a frail old innocent man to jail for the rest of his life or setting a murderer free is a heap of anecdotal evidence about Phil Spector holding guns to people's heads and generally hating all women a lot and a suspicion that Lana Clarkson wasn't really happy all the time.
Deliberating over the pros and cons of Phil Spector's guilt must be an energy-sapping task – pro: Phil Spector told his driver he killed someone; con: Phil Spector is a tiny puny old man. Pro: why would a pretty girl like Lana Clarkson shoot herself in the face, sitting down, with her handbag on her shoulder?; con: something dull about how some people died during the French revolution. You see, it's a minefield. A minefield, people.
So no wonder the Phil Spector murder trial jury can't make up its mind about whether Phil Spector did it or not, as Reuters reports:
The jury in the murder trial of Phil Spector said on Tuesday it was unable to reach a unanimous verdict on the charges against the legendary rock producer, and the judge dismissed the jurors for the day. The jury said it had taken four ballots, but was split 7-5 over the verdict. The jury did not tell the judge if the split favored a guilty or not guilty verdict… "Is there anything more that can be done?" [judge] Fidler asked the jury foreman. "I honestly don't," the foreman replied.
But this isn't going to be like the last time that the Phil Spector trial jury couldn't reach a verdict, when all the judge did was tell them what not to watch on TV – now the judge is getting impatient. Today when the Phil Spector murder trial jury returns, the representatives for the prosecution and defence might be asked to reargue their key points, and the judge may even instruct the jurors to consider a charge of manslaughter when previously murder was the only option open to them.
Whether this will change anything seems unlikely – from the jury foreman's demeanour, it appears as though the members of the Phil Spector jury are so firmly entrenched in their opinions that nothing will make any of them back down. Perhaps, though, that isn't because the jury is legitimately hung – perhaps the jurors are just pretending that they can't decide whether Phil Spector is guilty because, like us, the thought of not seeing that gloriously lesbian wig perched atop of Phil Spector's head every morning like some kind of wonderful nylon crown breaks their hearts into pieces.
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