Retired NY judge says this move by jurors makes him 'more confident' about unanimous verdict

30 May 2024

As the jury in former President Donald Trump's first criminal trial continues deliberations into a second day, one retired New York judge expressed doubt about a hung jury based on something he noticed when deliberations began.

During an interview with CNN's Boris Sanchez, retired Queens County Supreme Court Judge George Grasso observed that the jury was exhibiting a high degree of professionalism both when listening to Judge Juan Merchan's instructions and when deliberating. He said one particular thing jurors did at the start of deliberations signaled that a unanimous verdict was far more likely than a hung jury.

"This is a very serious jury," Grasso said. "On the first day of deliberations. which was yesterday, the jury sent a note out that they wanted to have such a wide swath of the judge's instructions re-read to them. That shows us that they are doing exactly what they should be doing in this case — they're going to dot the I's and cross the T's."

"It actually makes me more confident that we're going to get a unanimous verdict in this case because they appear to be acting as a team," Grasso continued.

The retired judge went on to say that while Judge Merchan was re-reading his instructions to the jury on how they were to consider evidence and testimony, he watched how each juror behaved. Grasso noted that juror number one — the foreperson for the 12-person jury — was uniquely "locked in" and was "literally hanging on to every one of the judge's words."

"Let me tell you, as a judge who's delivering further instructions to jurors, you just don't see it like that so often," Grasso said. "So this tells me they're starting in as a team. they're going to do this as a team and i think they're going to work hard to come to a verdict."

"I won't hold my breath about hearing of getting a verdict today or maybe even tomorrow, we may go into next week on this," he added.

The jury began deliberations on Tuesday, after prosecutors completed their closing arguments. During an interview last week on PBS' Washington Week with the Atlantic, Politico legal correspondent Josh Gerstein said that he didn't think the jury would take more than three days to come to a unanimous verdict. He said it was "very likely" that jurors would be ready to read their verdict to the judge by the end of the day on Friday, after six weeks of trial proceedings and roughly an additional week of deliberations.

Trump is facing 34 felony counts of falsifying business records pertaining to an alleged hush money payment scheme he orchestrated to buy the silence of women claiming to have had affairs with him. While the payments themselves are not a crime, prosecutors allege Trump covered up the hush money payments by disguising them as legal fees to his former personal attorney Michael Cohen, as a means of preventing voters from learning about the alleged affairs before the 2016 election. Cohen testified under oath that there was no legal retainer and that the money was a reimbursement to him for fronting the cost of the hush money payments.

Watch Grasso's segment below, or by clicking this link.

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