As the Manhattan jurors deciding Harvey Weinstein’s fate were about to begin their second day of deliberations on Friday, a note was delivered to the judge. One of the 12 had a concern.
The juror, a young man, was summoned to the courtroom. He sat in the jury box and began to vent his frustrations.
He wanted to “report what I heard and saw yesterday,” he told Justice Curtis Farber of State Supreme Court, who is overseeing the trial. The man said he had overheard others on the jury — in an elevator and outside the courthouse on Thursday — talking about another member of the group. What he had observed, he believed, amounted to misconduct.
Justice Farber thanked the man and sent him back to the jury room. The judge then denied a motion by Mr. Weinstein’s lawyers for a mistrial, saying it did not appear that the discussions cited by the juror involved actual trial evidence.
“Notably,” the judge said, “whoever was the topic of conversation has not reported it to the court.”
The surprising episode provided a rare peek into the friction that can develop among jurors in a high-stakes trial, disagreements that generally remain behind closed doors. It also seemed, at least briefly, as though it might derail the disgraced film mogul’s second New York trial on sex crime charges, and create another twist in the long-running case.
