JURY Hung on First Guantanamo Civil Trial

The hits keep on coming from a train wreck of a presidency.

Ahed Khalfan Ghailani is the first detainee who has been held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba to be tried in civilian court under Obama's treasonous policy of treating acts of war as law enforcement issues. Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani faces charges of conspiracy and murder in the attacks in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The bombings killed 224 people, including a dozen Americans, and wounded thousands of others.

"This is Ghailani, " Chernoff said last week, pointing at the defendant, who at times appeared to be joking and laughing with his attorneys when the jury was not present. "This is al Qaeda, this is a terrorist. This is a killer. I ask that you return a verdict of guilty on all counts."

Today the jury was deliberating and a verdict was expected, but a note was sent to the judge by, presumably, the jury foreman. According to a FOX News broadcast, the note, written in broken English, asked the judge to replace her with an alternate. It seems this juror complained that the other members of the jury were giving her a hard time for "her opinions," and she didn't want to serve anymore.

If the jury is deadlocked, it is unlikely the prosecution could assemble the witnesses who testified in this trial. The logistics involved in bringing a number of witnesses from Kenya and Tanzania to testify would be difficult, if not impossible, to repeat.

NY Times blog here:

A juror in the trial of the first former Guantánamo detainee tried in the civilian court system asked the judge during deliberations on Monday to take her off the case, saying she was alone in her views and felt she was being “attacked for my conclusion.”

[...]

The note suggested that the jury in Federal District Court in Manhattan was split 11 to 1, although it was unclear whether the juror was alone in wanting to acquit or to convict Mr. Ghailani.

If the split is ultimately deadlocked, the judge, Lewis A. Kaplan, could order a mistrial.

The juror who sent the note, which was somewhat ungrammatical, said she felt “secure and I have come to my conclusion but it doesn’t agreed with the rest of the juror.

“My conclusion is not going to change,” the juror wrote.

Saying she felt she was being attacked by the other jurors, she asked Judge Kaplan whether she could be excused or replaced by an alternate juror.

The judge, after reading the note aloud to the lawyers and prosecutors outside the presence of the jury, said he saw nothing in the note “to support the view that there is any kind of personal disharmony” among the jurors, “as opposed to a strenuous disagreement, perhaps.”

But he added that it was hard to be certain.

With the agreement of both sides, Judge Kaplan called the jurors into the courtroom and reread part of the instructions he delivered last week when they began deliberations after four weeks of testimony in the case.

The section he read to the jurors said it was their duty “to consult with one another and to deliberate with a view to reaching an agreement.

“Each of you must decide the case for yourself,” Judge Kaplan read, “but you should do so only after consideration of the case with your fellow jurors, and you should not hesitate to change an opinion when convinced that it is erroneous.”

With that, the judge sent the jurors back to continue their deliberations.

The judge broke for lunch.