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Jury in Black fraud trial struggles to reach verdict

A jury in the racketeering and fraud trial of fallen media tycoon Conrad Black sent a note to the judge on Tuesday saying they are unable to reach a verdict after nine days of deliberations and asking for advice.

In response, US District Judge Amy St. Eve briefly called the jurors into her courtroom and told them they must make "every reasonable effort" to reach a unanimous decision. The jurors then returned to their deliberations.

The jurors' note, read to the court by St. Eve, said: "We have discussed and deliberated on all the evidence and are still unable to reach a unanimous verdict on one or more counts. Please advise."

The note was signed by the jury foreman and ended with: "P.S. We have read the jury instructions very carefully."

Black and three other defendants are accused of swindling shareholders in the Hollinger In-ternational Inc newspaper empire out of more than US$60 million. Black faces 13 criminal counts, including mail fraud, wire fraud and racketeering.

The trial began on March 20. In total, the jurors are considering 42 counts against the four individuals and had available for review thousands of pages of factual doc-uments about newspaper sales.

Black, 62, a member of the British House of Lords, faces a maximum penalty of 101 years in federal prison if convicted on all counts against him, although lawyers said a sentence anywhere near that stiff was unrealistic.

After St. Eve read the jurors' note but before she called them back into the courtroom, Ronald Safer -- an attorney for defendant Mark Kipnis and speaking for the defense -- said the judge should accept that the jury was unable to reach a verdict.

He later told reporters outside court that he was not calling for a mistrial, instead saying the jurors should be able to come back with verdicts on "whatever they have."

Lead prosecutor Eric Sussman told St. Eve that the government put the actual time of deliberations at only about seven full days and urged that the jurors continue trying to reach a verdict or possibly returning a partial verdict, meaning delivering the decisions they had already agreed upon.

The judge told the attorneys the jury has paid "incredible attention" throughout the trial. "I do think there is some benefit to bringing the jury back into the courtroom and reinstructing them," she said before calling the jurors to appear.

Hollinger International once owned community papers across the US and Canada. The company name has been changed to Sun-Times News Group.
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