impeachment case will be dead on arrival. and that he essentially he, the jury foreman, plans to coordinate the upcoming senate trial with its defendant. and everything i do during this, i am coordinating with white house counsel. there will be no difference between the president s position and our position as to how to handle this. so yesterday on this show, i made the analogy of the upcoming trump impeachment trial to the o.j. simpson trial in which a man who many people believed was guilty was instead acquitted. with that acquittal becoming meaningness for a lot of his fellow citizens. overnight a friend sent me a tweet by professor kendi that i think sums it up even better because the outcome of the o.j. simpson trial was indeed in doubt. no one knew what that verdict was going to be until it happened. whereas trump s trial in that trial, to quote professor kendi, it s becoming like a jim crow trial. deep down everyone knows
and weight is put by a family member impacted by a loved one on trial. that may not work. the defense s job is to create doubt as far as saving this person s life and trying to delay the trial because this is one of those inevitable cases. you know this is a very, very slow guilty plea, and what the defense wants to do is lay enough groundwork for possible appeals, which some of us may know it takes years and years and years on death penalty cases for the death penalty to be actually impacted. so what we have right here is a slow what we call a slow guilty plea where they re trying to preserve this man s life and try to get to the hearts of some of those jurors. so meanwhile, as we talk about this and mariana reporting on the fact there is a federal case, the state case, the death penalty, charleston grappling with the mistrial of michael slager, so that s competing for headlines, and we re hearing from the jury foreman who says in the slager case that while there was a mistrial
so there we have the jury foreman for the slager case. that will go to a new trial, but as we look at the graphic now, and i want to show everybody, eric, the roof jury. here we know we re hearing from the foreman in the slager case, you know, they tried to come to consensus, they couldn t do it. this is a different mix up or a different makeup, rather, of a jury, and they are basically deciding whether or not to take a man s life, a young man s life for a horrific crime that he confessed. what is the onus when it comes to a jury that has to go behind closed doors to come up with that verdict? you have to lk at several factors. you have to look at mitigating circumstances. what this young man s life was like. what things impacted him and brought him to this particular decision to kill nine people. you also have to look at the impact on the victims, their pain and suffering and other factors such as that, and it s very difficult for a jury to decide they re going to take a person s
factual information. some people didn t do the same. how much of a role do you think race may have played inside the jury room? i don t believe it played a role inside the jury room. not at all? not that i could have seen. what was the chief argument being made against manslaughter and against murder as well? self-defense. nbc s gabe gutierrez has been following this story from the very beginning. he s joining us now from charleston, south carolina. gabe, good to visit with you. what more are you hearing about jurors decision in this case? we know the jury foreman said the video of the scott shooting, this was striking, he said it did not necessarily make this an open and closed case. reporter: that s right, peter. good afternoon. what s also interesting about this case a what we re hearing from the jury foreman is the actual breakdown of how it all ended up. this was clearly not open and shut. dorsey montgomery said first he was leading toward murder but toward the en
actually an emotional note from the one holdout juror who told the judge he could not in clear conscience convict michael slager. interestingly enough, a separate part of that note said he could not look in walter scott s family s eyes and tell them michael slager was innocent. clearly indecision there. the other two notes coming from the jury foreman who said that it was just that one juror, that the 11 others were already decided. the third note saying that the juror was having, quote, issues. apparently that juror at some point became very emotional. and could not come to a decision along with the rest of the jurors. walter scott s family just spoke. what did they say? very emotional response from them. one of their attorneys saying that this isn t a story about one black family against michael slager. that this was the world against michael slager, p in the pursuit of justice. they pray the one undecided