After deliberating for about four and half hours, the jury in the Isaiah Kalebu trial went home today at 3 p.m. with no decision reached.
Here's what I think that might mean, from most plausible to least plausible:
1) Absolutely nothing. From the outside this may seem like a simple case. Kalebu has admitted he was there the night of the South Park rapes and murder to "attack my enemies," and a ton of evidenceâfrom DNA to eye-witness testimonyâhas been introduced to show he committed the crimes. But even if the jury were to view it as a simple case, it could still take them a while to go through each and every charge Kalebu is facing. (Premeditated murder in the first degree, felony murder, attempted first degree murder, first degree rape, and first degree burglaryânot to mention a whole bunch of possible "enhancements" for use of a deadly weapon and some "lesser and included" crimes that can be added to the five main charges.) The jury instruction packet explaining how to handle all of this is over 50 pages long and reads like a Choose Your Own Adventure: If guilty on this, go here and determine this. If not guilty on that, go here and consider this other thing. Say the jury needed to spend an hour on each of the five main counts, which sounds reasonable to me. If that were the case, then they'd be almost done by now, but not quite. So why'd they break at 3 p.m. if, perhaps, they're close to finished? There's a swearing-in ceremony taking place at the courthouse this afternoon that necessitates them breaking early.
2) Kalebu's testimony on Wednesday was a lot to digest. Remember, this jury is not privy to everything you've been reading about on Slog. In fact, a lot of the most interesting things in this case so far have happened outside the presence of the jury. I can report on those things, but the jury can't see or hear them. They don't know anything, for example, about the arguments over Kalebu's competency to stand trial and the last-minute efforts to get him an insanity defense. So imagine you're a juror, and at the end of this case in which you've never before seen the defendant in person, he shows up one day to testify under heavy security, in a packed courtroom, with a high bench blocking your view of everything but his upper body as he testifies. He admits to being there the night of the murder, but he also says he's been diagnosed as mentally ill. And that's the entirety of the defense's case. Right after that they rest. In your presence, mental illness has never before been talked about at this trial. It's not talked about in the closing arguments. It's not dealt with in the jury instructions. What do you do? It might take a little longer than one would expect to sort this out.
3) The defense's closing argument was a lot to digest. As I wrote this morning, all it takes is one juror with a reasonable doubt to prevent a convictionâand the defense's closing statement took an aggressive, risky, hard-edged, and basically buckshot approach to sowing reasonable doubt wherever, and in whomever, it could. Maybe someone on the jury now doubts the credibility of the survivor's testimony, as the defense hoped someone would, or thinks of the DNA or fingerprint evidence in this case as based upon junk science, as the defense argued it was. Maybe several people think one or both of these things. Or maybe there's just a complicated disagreement over whether these crimes were committed with premeditation. In the defense's closing argument, remember, attorney Michael Schwartz pointed to the survivor of the attacks and said: "The best evidence of a lack of premeditation... is sitting right there in the second row.â The argument was that because one of the attacked women survived, the attacks could not have been premeditated. Even if one finds that argument flimsy, finding premeditation requires jurors to project themselves into the mind of the accusedâwhich may be particularly hard to do in this case, given what they've heard from Kalebu.
The jury will reconvene at around 9 a.m. tomorrow.
