Juror#27
I know the jury foreman mentioned it a little, but can you give us a little more info about the whole deliberation process? the specific evidence you looked, the voting, what went on in the deliberation room and so on.
Sure. First thing we did was vote on our foreman. Some of us did not want the position, and so we voted on the jurors who were willing to accept. I voted for juror #1, a very intelligent and sweet lady who IMO was the best choice to represent us. We looked at what supplies we might need and we asked for them, plus a copy of the jury instructions and AEG/CM contract. Was much easier for everyone to just have their own copy of those. Someone mentioned T.I.I. and we all agreed we should watch it so we asked for that plus a tv/blu-ray player.
After that, as our foreman said we wanted to finally blow off steam and vent to each other, and we did do that, but I thought we got down to business just a little too quickly. There were SO many witnesses, SO much evidence, SO much to discuss, I thought we should spend a full day or even two just kind of gossiping and going over the whole trial to kind of get it all settled in our minds. There was so much to the trial that it was a bit overwhelming to try and make sense of it all at the end. I thought that just kind of generally discussing the whole ordeal would be good for us but we never really did that in depth. Our foreman was one of the jurors who was itching to get it over with so we followed his lead and just got right to the verdict form.
We took a quick poll to see where we all stood on question 1, Did AEG hire Murray? First result was 6 unsure, 4 no, 2 yes. This question was such a grey area for us to deal with. Clearly there wasn't a fully executed written contract, so we took that off the table. But there was a lot of email communication and actions between AEG and Murray. So we left day 2 with that up in the air, but when we came in on day 3 we talked for a bit about it and took another vote. It was a unanimous 12-0 to answer yes.
So then we moved to question 2, and again we took a vote. I am ashamed to admit that in our initial vote, I ignored the "for which he was hired" portion of the question and I voted "yes". As we read the results we realized we didn't go over the question thoroughly enough and we scrapped the results of the vote. We then discussed the question at length and examined what we thought was relevant to the question. What did they actually hire him to do? Did anything stand out which would alert AEG that CM was not fit to provide basic medical care? We didn't see anything. Was MJ's condition during this time evidence that CM was not fit or competent? No, we did not believe so. We watched the majority of This Is It on the afternoon of day 3 and the rest on the morning of day 4.
Day 4 we finished watching This Is It, talked about the question some more, and went to lunch. We were going to lunch earlier than usual during deliberations because we were partially sequestered and it was easier for the court attendants to get us to and from lunch that way. After lunch we decided to vote on question 2 and the result was 10-2. We talked about it a bit more since we wanted to have a unanimous decision, but when it became clear that the vote would stand we decided to hit the buzzer twice and get on with it.
The deliberation process was at times chaotic and intense, and at times very productive and enlightening. It was tough to keep everyone on the same page, keep small side discussions from happening, and generally keep ourselves on task. There was a knock on the door every 10 minutes it seemed like. We couldn't talk at all unless every member was in the room at the same time. Which was tough in itself since so many of the jurors had to use the restroom so often. It was definitely a bit of a pressure cooker situation, especially since on those last days we were so cooped up and guarded.
just those small details.
