The embattled jurors in Bill Cosby’s sex assault trial remained deadlocked for yet another day Thursday, — while the embattled comedian called on the judge to declare a mistrial.
The panel, which has now considered the comic’s fate for a whopping 41-hours, were ordered to return to court at 9:00 a.m. Friday morning to resume discussion.
“We’re into the 40th hour, and we can only imagine the emotional and physical toll this is taking on the jurors,” Cosby’s spokesman Andrew Wyatt told reporters outside the Montgomery County Courthouse before the group was dismissed. “We can only hope the judge– if they don’t have a verdict right now– will release them, and say this is a deadlock.”
Montgomery County Judge Steven O’Neill ignored the comments, and dismissed the panel just after 9:00p.m.
Yet before they were released for the evening, a rattled O’Neill bizarrely brought in the exhausted-looking jury, appeared to chastise them, and sent them back to the jury room–forgetting to formally dismiss them.
“In keeping to our deliberation schedule, it is 9:00pm,” the distracted judge scowled. “In keeping with the last instruction, you are deliberating under that instruction.”
Five minutes later, after realizing he’d just sent the panel back to work, he called them back in again.
“I may have been unclear in where we are right now,” O’Neill said. “You must be very tired. If i conveyed you were to go back and continue to work, I apologize.”
They were then finally escorted back to their hotel, where they have been sequestered since the trial began on June 5.
The seven men and five women sent out a note at 11:06 a.m., declaring “We cannot come to a unanimous consensus on any of the counts.”
An elated Cosby smiled broadly as O’Neill read the note.
“He is just happy to know he has 12 people of his peers who understand that the facts of this case don’t add up, the inconsistencies with Ms. [Andrea] Constand’s statements,” Wyatt said soon after.
Later in the day, he called on the judge to declare a mistrial.
“The record has been broken for Montgomery County, for deliberations, Wyatt said. “We definitely want this thing to end, and hope the judge will tell jurors they’ve done their civic duty and that they’ve done it with ethics and integrity, and release them.”
Montgomery County does not keep statistics on length of jury deliberation, the court says.
The 79-year-old faces up to 30 years behind bars if convicted of three counts of aggravated indecent assault for purportedly drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand at his Cheltenham home in Jan. 2004.
Mere minutes before jurors declared their gridlock, Constand tweeted out a video of herself playing what appears to be wastepaper basketball, accompanied by the phrase “always follow through.”