Jurors in the Michael Jackson trial will be back again on Monday after ending their first full week of deliberations without reaching a verdict on the charges against the pop star.
The jurors asked a number of questions Friday and also requested to have some testimony read back to them. Judge Rodney Melville held at least three meetings with attorneys from each side.
Legal experts say the lengthy and complex instructions issued by the Judge may be responsible for the extended deliberations. "This is a huge, huge celebrity trial, so you can bet that they're going to want to read those jury instructions pretty carefully," said Donna Shestowsky, a law professor at the University of California.
Shari Seidman Diamond, a law professor at Northwestern University, agreed: "Running through these instructions is the use of words that are real words in everyday life that have different legal meanings."
She said that terms such as "attempt," "reasonable" and "conspiracy" have specific meaning in criminal law and "we know that makes instructions harder to deal with."
Diamond said that judges could make jury instructions more palatable but rarely did so as they were more concerned with making sure the instructions were unflawed and would not lead to a reversal on appeal.
Peter Tiersma, a member of the California Judicial Council's task force on criminal jury instructions, said it was easier for a judge to simply copy the text of a legal opinion or of a statute in the instructions.
He said that no matter how dense or incomprehensible the instructions were, "if you changed it, you risked getting it wrong."
As an example, Diamond pointed out that the explanation of ‘reasonable doubt’ was buried on page 45 of the instructions, which offered little explanation of why jurors should ignore certain pieces of evidence.