The Daily Background
| More speculation and overanalyzation of the Libby jury’s activities
by Arlen Parsa
Recently, I’ve joked a little about the type of speculation and over-analysis that happens when juries are deliberating in high profile cases and they make certain requests (which come in the form of “notes”). The Libby jury on Thursday asked for post-it notes, masking tape, an easel, and photos of the witnesses.
And people have been speculating as to what these requests mean ever since. At the time, I half-seriously, half-jokingly suggested that they might be making a diagram on the easel with the stickies and the pictures of the jury in order to sort of “map out” a timeline of the events in the case.
Well, if you find this sort of speculation interesting, you might be interested in a brief exchange that happened on MSNBC’s Hardball between Chris Matthews and David Shuster. What follows is a rough transcript I typed up, since the official transcript won’t be available until Monday afternoon.
SHUSTER: Unlike yesterday [Thursday], there were no notes, no indication that they’ve had some problems in the jury room, so the only thing you can really deduce is that perhaps they’re moving very methodically. There was some indication yesterday based on a note that they wanted pictures of all 19 witnesses who testified, so one could assume perhaps that they’re trying to essentially map out the different witnesses and what they said as part of making their decision.
[…]
MATTHEWS: David, how do the jurors, even if they have a really smart, organized foreman or forewoman, how do they organize all this information from 19 different witnesses?
SHUSTER: Chris, the way that I’ve seen it done in the past is that the jury will essentially develop a flowchart, they’ll put essentially a timeline on [an] easel, and make essentially a calendar for themselves of what testimony and what evidence they believed happened at a particular day.
If they’re doing that in this case, that could be a problem for the defense, because the defense argument was very sort of passionate, emotional, they were trying to plead with the jury to consider the emotions in this case. The prosecution: much more sort of matter-of-fact saying that here the seven or eight government officials who testified, saying Scooter Libby knew this information before he said he first learned it, and to the extent that the jury is going back and trying to piece together that timeline in a very sort of methodical, earnest sort of fashion– that would seem to help the prosecution, but who knows?
We do know, Chris, that there is a retired math teacher on the jury, there is also an MIT economist, but then there are also people who don’t have much education who are serving on the jury, and sometimes in a complicated case, just bringing the collective knowledge together and getting people to agree on what the witnesses testified to, sometimes that can take a little bit of time as well, Chris.
