So far I've only managed to watch a few hours of yesterday's video. But I did see the end of Brachler's cross-examination of Dr. Gur. And the start of King's re-direct of Dr. Gur. Ironically he tried to ask a lot of questions that sounded facetious, but they were all sustained when Brachler objected!
Today the defense has moved onto one of their investigators who obtained and reviewed several video tapes of Holmes while he was in jail or in the hospital. They're trying to show some of the videos now. There were a few that the judge isn't going to allow them to show. The video they're showing now has no audio, and because the video screen in the courtroom is so small you can't really see it on camera, so this is really boring.
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Interesting ... the defense has rested their case, and Brachler said he's not going to call any rebuttal witnesses. That's unexpected! Everyone had expected that Brachler would call a Dr. Resnick to rebut the things testified to by Dr. Gur. But for some reason he's decided not to do that.
I suspect he's decided NOT to call his rebuttal doctor because (a) he feels he's made a good enough impression to the jury about how non-credible Dr. Gur's testimony and report are, and (b) he feels that having another doctor testify might be too much for the jury and he doesn't want to continue to throw this stuff at them if he doesn't have to. My guess is that they met about this last night to discuss the pros and cons of calling Dr. Resnick and made their decision. But I'm pretty sure that the defense team is a little shocked.
The news is definitely shocked. I switched to The Denver Channel's broadcast of the trial and they were freaking out a little over the unexpected turn of events. They hadn't anticipated both sides to rest this quickly and were trying to get the message out via social media while they were also attempting to broadcast their commentary. It was rather funny!
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Both sides have 'rest' and the judge is going to dismiss the jury for the rest of the day and Monday. The judge and jury are staying in order to debate various things like the instructions the judge will be giving the jury.
Before dismissing the jury, the judge did tell them what "the plan" is for next week. Here's his plan:
- the rest of today and Monday the jury will be at home and the rest of the court will go over various legal items that they need to go through
- court will start on Tuesday at 9am with closing arguments
- the prosecution will go first and has a maximum of 2 hours, after which they'll take a break
- the defense will go second, if they want, and will also have a maximum of two hours
- they'll only take a one hour lunch after the closing arguments
- after lunch the judge will go through the entire list of instructions with them, in court, and they'll each receive a copy of these instructions to follow along
- the judge will also then identify who is a deliberating juror and who is an alternate - there are 7 alternates now
- the deliberating jury will be sent to a jury room on one side of the building, the alternates will be sent to another room on the other side of the courtroom - they are not allowed to talk to each other if they should see each other in the courthouse
- the alternates MUST be present everyday in a separate jury room until the deliberating jury has come to a decision, they can't stay at home
- both sets of jurors will be provided lunch in their respective rooms so they don't have to worry about running into people in the courthouse
- the deliberating jury can only deliberate when all 12 of them are inside the jury room - no where else, and not when less than 12 are present
- once all this happens on Tuesday, they can begin their deliberations
- when they've reached a verdict, the court requires 3 hours to call everyone to the court before the verdict can be read (I'm not sure if that means evenings, or if they'll wait till the next morning)
The jury almost got out of court about 15 minutes ago, but the judge had forgotten to read all his admonishments, so he called them back to do that! There are a LOT of admonishments.
[the jury is leaving]
The judge is now asking to continue to review the jury instructions. The defense wants to have some time to prepare some additional instructions for the jury. They had anticipated they'd have more time after all the evidence was presented to do this, but because the prosecution isn't presenting a rebuttal witness, they aren't ready.
The defense is also mentioning that they have 6 witnesses they were planning to call for the sentencing portion of the trial, but none of them are available the last two weeks of July. They're just giving everyone a heads up should the jury finish deliberations earlier than anticipated.
[lunch break]
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