Friday, April 10, 2009

Phil Spector Retrial: Trial Facts

Updated!
Second Trial: Guilty of 2nd Degree Murder

Verdict reached on April 13th, 2009. 28 Hours, 57 Minutes of deliberation.

Number of Days of Trial
I'm going back over all my notes and I realize there were six days of voir dire instead of five!

October, 2008: 8 Days of Trial
6 Days of Voir Dire
1 Day of Opening Statements
1 Day of no testimony. Juror #14 injured his foot.

November, 2008: 9 Days of Trial
9 Days of Testimony

December, 2008: 11 Days of Trial
10 Days of Testimony
1 Day of no testimony. Juror #1 went to the emergency room the night before.

January, 2009: 15 Days of Trial
14 Days of Testimony
1 Day of no testimony. Truc Do is ill.

February, 2009: 15 Days of Trial
14 Days of Testimony
1 Day of no testimony. Spector had a medical procedure.

March, 2009: 14 Days of Trial
5 Days of Testimony
4 Days of hearings outside the jury's presence.
3.5 Days of Closing arguments
1.5 Days of Deliberations

April, 2009: 7 Days of Trial
7 Days of Deliberations

Total as of April 13th, 2009: 79 Days of Trial


Voir Dire started on October 20th, 2008 and took five days. CORRECTION! SIX DAYS!

Opening Statements were presented on October 28th, 2008.

The following day, the trial was halted due to Juror #13 (alternate #1) injuring their foot in the parking lot the evening before.

Testimony begins November 3rd, 2008. (This is where I started counting the days of testimony.)

The prosecution rested their case-in-chief on January 22nd, 2009 after calling 33 witnesses.

The defense began their case on January 26th, 2009.

The defense ended their case on March 12th, 2009 calling 18 witnesses. The prosecution started their rebuttal case the same day. (There was one rebuttal witness called out of order within the defense case and that was Lisa Bloom.)

The prosecution rested their rebuttal case on March 16th, 2009 calling only four rebuttal witnesses.

Only 1 witness was called by both parties. Officer James Hammond.

I believe there were 56 or 57 days where testimony was presented. CORRECTION! 52 Days of testimony. There were at least five days or more of trial where motions were heard or jury instructions were mulled over without the jury present. There were three and a half days of closing arguments.

I originally told Paul, the CNN reporter that I thought there were 71 or 72 days of trial. I forgot to add in the days of closing argument to that figure. I hope to have a total number of trial days up later tonight for this entry. I will be adding facts to this page as I accumulate them.


The First Trial:

The jury deliberated 43 hours. Update: Court TV reported they deliberated 44 hours. My original figure was obtained from this story.

First trial jury profile.

Here is a link to the old Court TV coverage of the first trial with most of the reporting by Harriet Ryan. There are also other great links there including Adriano De Souza's call for help, the civil deposition in Spector's suit against his former attorney, Robert Shapiro as well as a some of the E-mails Lana Clarkson wrote. The story on the mistrial indicates the jury deliberated 44 hours.

Here is a link to a story that states the jurors first deadlocked on September 10th, 2007, on their seventh day of deliberations. Up until that day they had deliberated a total of 27 hours. There were nine men and three women on that jury.

I do remember that towards the very end of the first trial the jury lost two alternates due to family emergencies.

If you have a link concerning facts about the first or second trial that contradict the information here, please email me the link. Sprocket.