New York (AFP) – A jury reached a partial verdict Tuesday in the sex trafficking trial of Sean “Diddy” Combs, but the panel was as of yet unable to agree on the most serious charge facing the music mogul — racketeering. Judge Arun Subramanian instructed the 12 New Yorkers considering Combs’s fate to keep working on that charge, and in the meantime the verdicts on the other counts will remain under wraps and only known to the jurors themselves.
“We have reached a verdict on counts 2, 3, 4 and 5. We are unable to reach a verdict on count 1 as we have jurors with unpersuadable opinions on both sides,” the jury of eight men and four women said in a note read aloud in court. The jury will return to the deliberation room on Wednesday morning. It was a dramatic development in a case that jurors only began considering together midday Monday. They must reach a unanimous decision to either acquit or convict.
Before the note was read aloud in court, the defense team huddled around Combs, who looked visibly anxious, alternating between hanging his head, staring straight ahead and rubbing his temples with his hand shielding his eyes. At times his fingers shook, and at one point he turned to wave to his daughters, one of whom waved back. And Combs — who was once one of the most powerful figures in the music industry — stared at the jurors intently as they filed into the courtroom to hear the judge’s response to their note, which was agreed upon by both parties.
Count One is the racketeering charge and accuses Combs of being the ringleader of a decades-long criminal organization that saw him direct loyal employees and bodyguards to commit myriad crimes at his behest. Those alleged crimes include forced labor, drug distribution, kidnapping, bribery, witness tampering and obstruction, arson, sex trafficking, and transportation to engage in prostitution. To find Combs guilty of racketeering, jurors would need to find the existence of a criminal enterprise and that the organization committed at least two of the offenses listed above. A conviction would carry a maximum sentence of life in prison.
“It is your duty as jurors to consult with one another and to deliberate with a view to reaching an agreement,” the judge told jurors, in repeating the instructions he gave them on Monday. “Each of you must decide the case for himself or herself, but you should do so only after a consideration of the case with your fellow jurors, and you should not hesitate to change an opinion when convinced that it is erroneous.”
– ‘Remarkably efficient’ –
In addition to racketeering, Combs faces two charges of sex trafficking and two charges of transportation for purposes of prostitution. That jurors have reached a verdict on four of the five accounts is “remarkably efficient,” as defense lawyer Marc Agnifilo put it in court after the note was read aloud. The seven-week trial included at times disturbing testimony along with thousands of pages of phone, financial, and audiovisual records.
Combs is charged with sex trafficking two women: Ventura and a woman who testified under the pseudonym Jane. Both were in long-term relationships with Combs, and they each testified about abuse, threats, and coercive sex in wrenching detail. But while his lawyers have conceded that Combs at times beat his partners, they insisted the domestic violence does not amount to sex trafficking, and vehemently deny that Combs led a criminal conspiracy.
Agnifilo scoffed at the picture painted by prosecutors of a violent, domineering man who fostered “a climate of fear.” Combs is a “self-made, successful Black entrepreneur” who had romantic relationships that were “complicated” but consensual, Agnifilo said. The defense dissected the accounts of Ventura and Jane and at times even mocked them, insisting the women were adults making free choices.
But in their final argument, prosecutors tore into the defense, saying Combs’s team had “contorted the facts endlessly.” Prosecutor Maurene Comey told jurors that by the time Combs had committed his clearest-cut offenses, “he was so far past the line he couldn’t even see it.” “In his mind he was untouchable,” Comey told the court. “The defendant never thought that the women he abused would have the courage to speak out loud what he had done to them.”
“That ends in this courtroom,” she said. “The defendant is not a god.”
© 2024 AFP
