Jury: Evidence 'Wasn't There'

The jurors who decided Michael Jackson's case said they avoided being star-struck, were put off by the accuser's mother and reached agreement in methodical and friendly deliberations.

"We looked at all the evidence, we looked at Michael Jackson and one of the first things we decided that we had to look at it was just like any other individual, not just as a celebrity," the foreman said. After that, "we were able to deal with it just as fairly as we could as with anybody else."

Jurors spoke in a tightly controlled news conference in a spare courtroom outfitted to look more like a TV studio. As a condition of their willingness to participate, they were identified by number, not by name. In a statement that the judge read in court after the verdict, jurors asked to be allowed to return to "our private lives as anonymously as we came."

They said they had built lasting friendships in the jury room and were able to put aside initial differences.

"I think we all just looked at the evidence and pretty much agreed," said juror No. 5.

The mother of the accuser, who tended to stare at the jurors, made them uncomfortable.

"I disliked it intensely when she snapped her fingers at us. That's when I thought "Don't snap your fingers at me, lady," said juror No. 5, a retired widow.

Juror No. 2 indicated he felt the mother singled him out because he was a fellow Hispanic.

"The mother, when she looked at me and snapped her fingers a few times and she says, 'You know how our culture is,' and winks at me, I thought, 'No, that's not the way our culture is."

Juror No. 10, a 45-year-old woman with one adult child and two teenage sons, discussed the panel's feelings about the 46-year-old pop star sharing his bed with boys.

"What mother in her right mind would allow that to happen? Just freely volunteer your child to sleep with someone. Not so much just Michael Jackson but any person for that matter. That's something that mothers are naturally concerned with," the juror said.

Jurors found no "smoking gun" in the evidence.

"We expected probably better evidence, you know, something that was a little more convincing, and it just wasn't there," said juror No. 10.

The mass of about 2,200 credentialed media representatives who gathered for the verdict surprised jurors. But juror No. 1 said, "By the time we got to deliberations, we were all so conditioned to the media, we didn't pay any attention."

The foreman said the jury took only two votes. They divided up tasks and used their notes to follow the timeline of events in the case.

"The timeline was really a concern," said juror No. 3, a 50-year-old woman, echoing comments by legal analysts. The prosecution said Jackson molested the teenage boy while trying to deal with the fallout from a television documentary that prompted outrage over his sleepovers at Neverland.