After having deliberated for about 30 hours, the jury in Bill Cosby’s sexual assault trial has announced that they are deadlocked and unable to come to a consensus on any of the three aggravated indecent assault charges against Cosby, but Judge Steven O’Neill isn’t having any of that. In an effort to avoid a hung jury, he has told the jurors to go back and “try again,” adding that he won’t set any kind of time limit on how long they have before they need to make a decision.
That comes from Deadline, which says Cosby’s defense team attempted to convince the judge to call a mistrial, but he rejected that idea as “inappropriate at this time.” That story also says that the members of the jury are “seemingly exhausted,” which is to be expected when seven men and five women spend 30 hours arguing about rape, but a separate report from the Associated Press specifically notes that one juror was “more upbeat” and “nodded along” as the judge told them all to keep deliberating.
The AP story also notes that Cosby’s team is taking this as a good sign, guessing that the jury is “conflicted about the inconsistencies” in alleged victim Andrea Constand’s testimony. She says that Cosby gave her pills that knocked her out, at which point he began raping her, but even though Cosby’s side has admitted that he gave her pills on the night in question (specifically some Benadryl), they maintain that anything else that happened was “a consensual moment of intimacy.”
If the jury remains deadlocked and cannot reach a verdict, the case will start all over again later with a new jury. Deadline notes that this could make some of Constand’s “emotionally raw testimony” lose some of its impact, which would be a big boost to Cosby’s defense.