Jurors

On summer nights in the mid-1960s, while black-and-white television crackled elsewhere in his Staten Island home with news of Southern violence and Vietnam, Bobby Lasnik would stretch out in his bedroom to let the righteous soundtrack of the civil rights movement waft into his impressionable teenage soul. Tuned in to WBAI-FM, coming across the water from Manhattan, he heard baleful laments about injustice that he would carry with him for a lifetime. "Suddenly there was someone speaking a certain kind of truth to you. You'd say, 'Wow!

GREENSBORO, N.C. — For a fourth day Wednesday, the jury in the John Edwards trial deliberated without reaching a verdict in a case focused on an illicit affair and federal campaign finance laws. The jury of eight men and four women must decide whether Edwards violated election laws when payments from two wealthy donors were used to cover up his affair with videographer Rielle Hunter during Edwards' failed run for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. Prosecutors contend that Edwards solicited $925,000 in illegal contributions from the donors in order to hide the affair and keep his campaign from collapsing in scandal.

In Hollywood anything is possible, and so it was that a Superior Court jury toured the McMartin Pre-School on Wednesday after a set-building company "reconstructed" it to approximate the way it looked in the late 1970s and early '80s when children were allegedly molested there. Bused to Manhattan Beach along with Los Angeles Superior Court Judge William Pounders in a Sheriff's Department van, jurors got their first and only look at the nursery school they have been hearing testimony about for nearly two years in the trial of Raymond Buckey and his mother, Peggy McMartin Buckey.

GREENSBORO, N.C. - A third day of jury deliberations in the campaign finance trial of former presidential candidate John Edwards passed without a verdict Tuesday, with the jurors due back in federal court Wednesday morning. The jury of eight men and four women requested two more prosecution exhibits, bringing to more than a dozen the number of exhibits sought by jurors since deliberations began Friday. The documents requested Tuesday were letters to or about Rachel "Bunny" Mellon, now 101, a billionaire heiress and Edwards supporter who gave $725,000 that was used to help hide the candidate's mistress during his failed campaign for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.

Jurors in the trial of former White House aide Oliver L. North completed another day of deliberation without a recurrence of medical complaints that had marked their previous day's work. A Public Health Service nurse examined juror Jean Johnson, 53, who had complained of high blood pressure Monday, and no further difficulties were reported from the jury room. Two other jurors with heavy colds were reported still at work. Having finished 21 hours of deliberation over four days, jurors were transported to their hotel for the night with instructions to resume their sessions this morning.

The jury in the MySpace cyber-bullying case has reached verdicts on three of four counts against a Missouri woman accused of perpetrating a hoax on a teenage girl who later committed suicide. Jurors deliberated all day Monday before telling the judge just before 5 p.m. that they had reached verdicts on three counts but were split on the fourth. U.S. District Judge George H. Wu sent the jurors home and asked them to return this morning for further deliberations on the final count. He did not ask jurors which counts they had reached verdicts on. Lori Drew, 49, is charged with three counts of violating federal computer statutes and one count of conspiracy for allegedly creating a MySpace account in the name of a fictitious 16-year-old boy and using it to engage in an online relationship with 13-year-old Megan Meier.

The case against fired White House aide Oliver L. North went to a federal court jury late Thursday after the judge told the panel that North's superiors did not have the right to "order anyone to violate the law" and that he could not be found innocent merely on those grounds. The instructions from U.S. District Judge Gerhard A. Gesell, before jurors were sequestered for the night, partly undercut North's principal line of defense. One of North's attorneys objected to the instructions.

To protect jurors from intense media coverage of the O.J. Simpson double murder trial, prosecutors Friday asked Judge Lance A. Ito to sequester jury members from the time they are selected until their discharge, meaning they could be kept from their families and jobs for months.

Jury-summons scofflaws, be on notice. The penalty-free ride for ducking jury duty is over. Los Angeles County courts this week began enforcing a rule that the vast majority of county residents simply ignore: Serving on a jury is mandatory if you're eligible. Under a new, get-tougher policy, potential jurors who fail to respond to summonses will first face a hearing and then a $1,500 fine.

A federal court jury in Los Angeles, after confirming the convictions of four men accused of laundering $350 million in drug profits through jewelry companies, was ordered Thursday to resume deliberations on undecided counts. The jury on Wednesday found Nazareth Andonian, his brother, Vahe Andonian, and Juan Carlos Seresi guilty of conspiring to launder money. However, the panel was dismissed before it could confirm the verdicts and make them official. That confirmation took place Thursday.

GREENSBORO, N.C. — A federal jury in the political corruption trial of former presidential candidate John Edwards deliberated for a second day Monday without reaching a verdict, as Edwards quietly awaited his fate inside a federal courthouse. The jury of eight men and four women requested seven prosecution exhibits. Among them were emails in 2006 and 2007 that discussed $725,000 provided to Edwards by wealthy heiress and supporter Rachel "Bunny" Mellon, now 101, during Edwards' campaign for the 2008 Democratic nomination.

GREENSBORO, N.C. - The jurors who will decide the fate of former presidential candidate John Edwards deliberated for more than four hours Friday before breaking for the weekend in a trial focused on complex campaign finance laws and lurid details of Edwards' extramarital affair. The jury of eight men and four women must decide whether Edwards knowingly conspired to violate federal election laws as part of a scheme to cover up his affair with videographer Rielle Hunter during his campaign for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.

His mother said a quiet prayer of thanks. His father dropped his head and rubbed his eyes. Four years after Los Angeles High School football star Jamiel Shaw II's death, the gang member accused of gunning him down because he was carrying a red Spider-Man backpack was convicted Wednesday of first-degree murder. Jurors deliberated for barely half a day before returning the guilty verdict against Pedro Espinoza, now 23. The panel found to be true allegations that Espinoza committed the crime in association with a gang and that he personally discharged a firearm.

Alan Jackson is, at 46, the youngest of the six candidates for Los Angeles County district attorney. But he's tried his share of high-profile cases, including the successful prosecution of music icon Phil Spector, and that in turn has helped to elevate his profile. For name recognition he can't match Los Angeles City Atty.  Carmen Trutanich, and some voters may still confuse him with the country music star of the same name, but Jackson has worked hard to distinguish himself from the rest of the pack.

Jurors deciding whetherGoogle Inc.stole Oracle Inc.'s technology are deadlocked on one of three questions about whether the search engine provider infringed copyrights to build Android software. U.S. Judge William Alsup in San Francisco, presiding over an intellectual property trial in its third week, sent the jurors home Friday and ordered them to return Monday for more deliberations. Alsup had said he would accept a partial verdict Friday and changed his plan after talking privately with Oracle's and Google's lawyers.

Moving swiftly after a judge dismissed his case Thursday morning, Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley six hours later refiled 24 perjury and voter fraud charges against Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alarcon and his wife, Flora Montes de Oca Alarcon. The new charges, which accuse the Alarcons of lying about living in a house in Panorama City so that the councilman could run for his 7th District seat, mirror the allegations in the grand jury indictment thrown out by Superior Court Judge Kathleen Kennedy, who was ruling on a defense motion.

After a jury favoring acquittal failed to reach a unanimous verdict, a judge declared a mistrial Wednesday for Gregory Diles, a former bodyguard accused of participating in the 1981 Laurel Canyon murders. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Curtis Rappe "reluctantly" excused the panel after each agreed with the foreman that further deliberations would not be fruitful. The jury had deadlocked 10 to 2 in favor of acquittal.

This just in from Fox News : “Fair trial for Zimmerman not likely on home turf, say legal experts.”  Well, actually one expert quoted in the story makes that precise argument: Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz. The second expert, criminal defense lawyer Mark Bederow, says only that pretrial publicity, including NBC's doctored tape of Zimmerman's 911 call, could prejudice potential jurors (wherever they live, presumably). The third expert, defense lawyer Lawrence Lustberg, agreed that finding jurors in the community who have not made up their minds “will require casting a wide net.” But he also said: “The single most important thing as to whether you get a fair trial is who's the prosecutor, who's the defense attorney and who's the judge?

The trial of a former Oakland Raiders defensive end accused of murder ended in a mistrial Wednesday when jurors failed to reach agreement on a verdict, according to authorities. Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Carlos A. Chung terminated the trial after jurors were unable to reach a verdict on whether Anthony Wayne Smith was involved in the killing of 31-year-old mechanic Maurilio Ponce on Oct. 7, 2008. The jury, which deliberated for nine days, split 8 to 4 for a guilty verdict, said Sandi Gibbons, a spokeswoman for the L.A. County district attorney's office.

This just in from Fox News : “Fair trial for Zimmerman not likely on home turf, say legal experts.”  Well, actually one expert quoted in the story makes that precise argument: Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz. The second expert, criminal defense lawyer Mark Bederow, says only that pretrial publicity, including NBC's doctored tape of Zimmerman's 911 call, could prejudice potential jurors (wherever they live, presumably). The third expert, defense lawyer Lawrence Lustberg, agreed that finding jurors in the community who have not made up their minds “will require casting a wide net.” But he also said: “The single most important thing as to whether you get a fair trial is who's the prosecutor, who's the defense attorney and who's the judge?