Approaching a verdict

The jury in the Holy Land Foundation trial has been deliberating for nearly two weeks, but had to start over halfway through when one juror was replaced by an alternate. Today the jury advised the judge that one member was refusing to deliberate. The jury has presumably otherwise reached verdicts on the 42 counts submitted to them. The judge gave the jury an Allen or “dynamite” charge instructing them to try to reach a verdict.
The government is confronted with especially serious challenges in cases such as the Holy Land Foundation prosecution. I worried here over the difficulty of terrorism cases that depend so greatly on the jury’s concerted attention to sometimes mind-numbing detail.
My guess, for what it is worth, which is nothing, is that the jury is on the verge of convictions on at least some of the 42 counts. Only the government objected to the judge’s Allen instruction, however, which tends to conflict with my guess. The Dallas Morning News provides a good report on today’s events. I wrote about the importance of the Holy Land Foundation case in “Coming clean about CAIR.”

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses