Jurors Reach Verdict In Donald Trump Hush Money Trial
30.05.2024 - 21:23
/ deadline.com
UPDATED, 2:10 PM: Donald Trump has been found guilty on all 34 felony counts in his criminal hush money trial.
UPDATED, 1:39 PM: Jurors deliberating in Donald Trump‘s criminal hush money trial have reached a verdict.
Judge Juan Merchan announced that the jurors had sent a note informing them of their decision. The verdict is expected to be read in about 30 minutes.
The verdict follows nine hours and 44 minutes of deliberations, per CNN.
PREVIOUSLY: Jurors deliberating in Donald Trump’s New York criminal hush-money trial are slated to return to court this morning to have a batch of trial transcripts read back to them, and to re-hear the jury instructions the judge spent more than an hour delivering on Wednesday.
The requests arrived in a pair of notes the jury sent to the presiding judge, state Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, a few hours into their first day weighing 34 felony charges against the former president.
If everything in the unprecedented trial is working as it should, jurors will have little or no idea of the small-scale conflict they set off with one of their requests, for a piece of trial transcript from the testimony of former tabloid publisher David Pecker.
That ask prompted Merchan to send the jury home a half-hour early Wednesday, at about 4 p.m., and got the lawyers on both sides jockeying out of view over which excerpts, exactly, to give to jurors from Pecker’s testimony about an August 2015 meeting at Trump Tower in New York.
“We may need your help,” Assistant Manhattan District Attorney Joshua Steinglass said to Merchan shortly after 5 p.m., when the lawyers returned to open court.
At issue was how expansively to interpret the jury request: Pecker talking just about the meeting that took