JOHNNY JURY'S ON DUTY
Question for judge
The jury in Johnny Depp and Amber Heard’s high-profile trial ended its second day of deliberations on Tuesday without a verdict.
The seven-person panel has been mulling the bombshell defamation case in Fairfax, Va., for a total of nine hours.
Jurors, who are set to return to court on Wednesday at 9 a.m., asked their first question Tuesday afternoon as they weighed whether Heard defamed her ex-husband in a 2018 op-ed. There was confusion among the jury over the headline of the essay, published in The Washington Post, that said, “I spoke up against sexual violence — and faced our culture’s wrath.”
As part of their work, jurors must answer eight questions related to Depp’s defamation claim, including whether the title of Heard’s op-ed was false. Judge Penney Azcarate said jurors had asked if they were to consider only the headline, or the entire op-ed, when deciding how to answer.
She said she would instruct the jurors that they were to consider the headline — and not the op-ed as a whole. “The statement is the headline and not the entire op-ed,” the judge said.
The jury question came at around 2 p.m. and the panel then continued their work until just before 5 p.m., before breaking for the day. They also deliberated for three hours Friday before taking off for the holiday weekend.
Texas civil lawyer Katherine Lizardo, who is not involved in the Depp case, said it was “too early to infer” which way the jury was leaning, but that the question Tuesday could be good for Depp.
“I think this question is favorable to Johnny Depp because the jury is now deliberating on the sexual abuse statement and if they are focusing on that then they might be questioning whether or not he committed sexual abuse on Amber Heard,” Lizardo told The Post.
Halim Dhanidina, a former California judge and current criminal defense attorney, said, “There is an old adage that trying to interpret juror questions is a little like reading tea leaves . . . You can’t really tell where the jury is just by looking at the question.”