A jury consultant said during interviews with media outlets Thursday she is not surprised the 12 decision makers in the Rod Blagojevich trial have requested Friday afternoon off.
Being on a jury in a major trial such as this can be emotionally draining, said consultant Theresa Zagnoli.
“They know they’re going to have to justify the verdict,” she said. “Not necessarily to the press, but just to their neighbors, their spouses, their families; they need to have a solid reason for why they raised their hand at a certain time.”
* If you’ve lost any faith in juries over the years, then make sure you watch this Chicago Tonight interview with the foreperson of Scott Fawell’s jury.
She talks about how they worked out a problem with people talking all at once (which may come from an old American Indian tradition of passing a sacred object from speaker to speaker), how the original vote went and how jurors were convinced to focus not just on the prosecution’s points but also look at the defense’s arguments. They run a Fawell clip during the interview where he makes some good points about how the jury probably wasn’t qualified, but if you’re looking for something to restore your faith in humanity a bit, watch this…
It now appears that the Blagojevich jurors plan to deliberate into next week, and though it’s awfully hard to guess what’s going on in the jury room, conventional wisdom is that long deliberations tend to yield convictions, as the jurors, mindful of the gravity of finding a person guilty, go over everything with extreme care and work to eradicate the reasonable doubts of a few potential holdouts.
Ex-governor Rod Blagojevich has committed “crimes” against Illinois arguably worse than those of corruption. In his six years in office, Blagojevich mismanaged the state bureaucracy into demoralized chaos and projected to the world such unpredictability, instability and general buffoonery that business has come to see the state as a questionable place, at best, in which to locate or expand. […]
Under Blagojevich, the state’s reputation as a place to do business has suffered as well. We should have a good reputation. Our business taxes are moderate overall; we are at the center of a huge market, and we have a rich transportation system. Yet according to CEO magazine, the Illinois business climate ranks 46th among the 50 states; Forbes, another business publication, says we rank 44th. Part of the reason for the abysmal ratings, I believe, is the perception that Illinois decision-makers are unpredictable and unstable. Business leaders crave predictability and stability, which helps them plan for the future.
For example, in Blagojevich’s first term, he proposed a gross receipts tax on business that would have been the largest tax increase in the state’s history. Businesses everywhere recoiled, and while the tax proposal was rejected by the legislature, businesses continue leery of doing or expanding business in a state whose leaders harbored such goofy (in their eyes) ideas.
Add to all this the surreal behavior of Blagojevich, twice elected as governor by Illinois voters, and you have a state which has become the punching bag of late night TV jokesters.
* Also, Rich Samuels has a Blagojevich flash-back video/audio page that you should browse.
