Courts

The Bizarre Statements Of A Juror From The Manafort Trial

A MAGA hat wearing juror in the Paul Manafort case explains why she thinks he's guilty.

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Paul Manafort (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Sure, Judge T.S. Ellis III may have strongly encouraged jurors not to reveal their identities after their duty was done in the trial of Paul Manafort, but he couldn’t force them to be silent. Wouldn’t you know it, one of the jurors appeared on Fox News last night to dish on what it was like in deliberations.

The juror, Paula Duncan, is really a fascinating character. A MAGA hat wearing ardent Trump supporter, she willing admitted she went into the trial wanting a particular outcome — she wanted to find Manafort not guilty, but the evidence was just too much:

“Finding Mr. Manafort guilty was hard for me. I wanted him to be innocent, I really wanted him to be innocent, but he wasn’t,” Duncan said. “That’s the part of a juror, you have to have due diligence and deliberate and look at the evidence and come up with an informed and intelligent decision, which I did.”

Duncan also revealed details about the 10 counts the jury was unable to come to a verdict on — there was a single juror that held out, 11 of the 12 jurors wanted to convict Manafort on all counts:

“We all tried to convince her to look at the paper trail,” Duncan said. “We laid it out in front of her again and again, and she still said that she had a reasonable doubt. That’s the way the jury worked. We didn’t want to be hung, so we tried for an extended period of time to convince her.”

“But in the end,” Duncan said, “she held out, and that’s why we have 10 counts they did not get a verdict.”

But despite being very confident about Manafort’s guilt, Duncan also parroted lines Donald Trump uses to undermine the Mueller investigation generally and the prosecution of Manafort specifically:

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“Certainly Mr. Manafort got caught breaking the law, but he wouldn’t have gotten caught if they weren’t after President Trump,” Duncan said of the special counsel’s case, which she separately described as a “witch hunt to try to find Russian collusion,” borrowing a phrase Trump has used in tweets more than 100 times.

Ummm I’m not sure she knows what a “witch hunt” means. See, because there is no such thing as a witch, when you go searching for one, you will necessarily find only innocent people. Contrast that with the Manafort case — Duncan herself believes he was guilty (calling the evidence “overwhelming”) on all 18 counts — whatever the reason he was investigated he still did something wrong. Notice how no one who trots out this “witch hunt” logic has any issues when drug smugglers get caught as a result of a routine traffic stop. Druggie McDrugerston wouldn’t have gotten caught if they weren’t after people with a broken tail light, but here we are.

Duncan even said she drove to the courthouse every day with her MAGA hat:

“Every day when I drove, I had my Make America Great Again hat in the backseat,” said Duncan, who said she plans to vote for Trump again in 2020. “Just as a reminder.”

As a reminder of what exactly? That she is still a Trump loyalist even as she convicts Manafort?

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In a lot of ways Duncan is the platonic ideal of a juror — setting aside her own beliefs in the face of overwhelming evidence. So maybe the system did actually work in this case, but let’s not forget that every juror is not able to set aside their beliefs just because of evidence.

The cognitive dissonance is strong in this one.

headshotKathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

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