The jury in the trial of Paul Manafort would have convicted the former Trump campaign chairman on all 18 criminal charges if not for one juror who had questions about the reasonable doubt standard of criminality, a juror told Fox News on Wednesday.
“There was one holdout,” Paula Duncan, a juror in the trial, said in an interview.
“We all tried to convince her to look at the paper trail. We laid it out in front of her again and again and she still said that she had a reasonable doubt.”
After almost four days of deliberations, a 12-member jury on Tuesday found Manafort guilty on two counts of bank fraud, five counts of tax fraud and one charge of failing to disclose foreign bank accounts.
But the jury of six men and six women could not reach a consensus on 10 other counts. Judge T.S. Ellis, who oversaw the trial in a U.S. federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, declared a mistrial on those 10 counts.
In the first public comments by a juror about the verdict, Duncan said the other 11 members were in agreement that Manafort was guilty on all 18 felony charges but that they could not get the one holdout to change her mind.
“We didn’t want it to be hung so we tried for an extended period of time to convince her. But in the end she held out and that’s why we have 10 counts that did not get a verdict,” Duncan said.
Duncan said she was speaking out to inform the public and that she was not concerned about her safety, even after the judge ruled that juror names would not be released in order to keep them safe.
“I thought that the public, America, needed to know how close this was and the evidence was overwhelming,” she said. “I did not want Paul Manafort to be guilty. But he was and no one is above the law.”
