The foreman said deliberations reached a critical point on the third day, when the process nearly broke down. Frustrations built because of the repeated 11 to 1 votes on one charge without any dissenting arguments during discussions. All the ballots were anonymous, and the other jurors were relying on the discussions to identify the holdout.

"Wednesday [April 26] was a very intense day," she said. "But there was no yelling. It was as if a heavy cloud of doom had fallen over the deliberation room, and many of us realized that all our beliefs and our conclusions were being vetoed by one person. . . . We tried to discuss the pros and cons. But I would have to say that most of the arguments we heard around the deliberation table were" in favor of the death penalty.

The foreman said deliberations broke off April 26 when one juror questioned why they should take another vote. "What for?" the foreman remembers the juror saying, "We all know how it is going to come out."

The next day a juror called in sick, and there were no deliberations. That Friday, the jury returned. The foreman told the group that she wanted to send a note to U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema stating that the jury was "not holding deliberations in the true sense of deliberations because the con arguments were not being thrown out on the table so we could investigate them as a group."

She said the jurors did not want any notes sent to the judge, so they decided that the whole group would raise anti-death penalty issues because that way the lone dissenter would not feel isolated or "ganged up on." Deliberations continued, but the foreman said the lone dissenter still did not raise any issues. Three days later, jurors delivered their decision to Brinkema.

The foreman said at the end of the deliberations she felt better about the process but not the outcome.

"I felt frustrated," she said, "because I felt that many of us had been cheated by the anonymity of the 'no' voter. We will never know their reason. We will never be able to hold their reason up to the light and the scrutiny of evidence, fact and law."




because there are people who like to show a point of view but not back it up with any facts much less any reason for coming to that conclusion... something Bush likes to do a lot... It's not fair unless the person who believes differently says and shows why... that's what a jury is for, and what diliberations are for. That is what politics are founded on and whay this country is called America and why we are FREE...

"How will we defeat Communism unless we know what it is? ... We have got to fight it with something better. Not try to conceal the thinking of our own people. They are a part of America and even if they think ideas that are contrary to ours they have a right to have them, a right to record them and a right to have them in places where they are accessible to others. It is unquestioned or it is not America."

- President Dwight Eisenhower, 1953
Gumby Reviewed by Gumby on . bush is going to pardon Moussoui... that's why he didn't get death http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/11/AR2006051101884.html Only one juror stood between the death penalty and Zacarias Moussaoui and that juror frustrated his colleagues because he never explained his vote, according to the foreman of the jury that sentenced the al-Qaeda operative to life in prison last week. I don't really think Bush was behind this one, but still kinda weird how the only vote for life was by someone who wouldn't say why, or even talk about Rating: 5