Johnny Depp trial: New details on jury question - LiveNOW from FOX

The Fairfax Virginia jury resumed deliberations today in the Johnny Depp defamation trial. He's suing his ex-wife actor Amber Heard for 50 million dollars. Depp argues her 2018 op-ed implied that he was abusive. She filed a 100 million dollar counterclaim after his attorney called her claims a hoax. Each is accusing the other trying to ruin the other's career. The jury unable to come to a verdict today. Again this was the second day of jury deliberations. They are back at 9 a.m eastern time tomorrow. I want to bring in legal analyst Nicole DeBoer to talk about what's going on here. Nicole first question for you because we're going to touch on the op-ed in just a second because the jury had a quick question today. But this timeline is this longer than what you're expecting or is this just about right? To me this is just about right. There was a lot of testimony in this case and a lot of evidence for this jury to consider and they've really been deliberating just for over a day at this point. And so this to me means that they're doing a very careful job of considering the evidence in this case. So they're trying to consider all of the evidence here and I want to pull in a clip from earlier today inside of the courtroom. I want to play it out for you because the jury did have a question for the judge. Take a listen. The question is does question number three the statement is false pertain to the headline I spoke up against sexual violence and faced our culture's wrath or does it pertain to the content of the statement everything written in the op-ed? So I think the confusion came in this particular one because the statement in question is the title of the op-ed. So I think they're just confused as whether it's the whole op-ed or just the title is the statement and it's clear that the title is the statement. So I was going to answer to say the title is the statement in question for number three. Does that seem appropriate to everybody? So eventually later on the DEP team, the DEP legal team pretty quickly agreed with Herd's team taking a little bit longer. But what did you make of this question from the jury? You know it is so hard to tell what a jury is thinking by just the question. Sometimes jurors ask questions because they're trying to demonstrate to one single person back there you know in the jury room that the rest of the group's understanding of what's happening is the correct understanding. Sometimes they ask a question because truly the group is debating about the answer to that question. So it's a little difficult to know exactly what this particular jury meant by the question. You know that said this defamation suit by DEP is very clearly encapsulated in that statement. That is the aggressive statement where Herd claims to be the victim of domestic abuse and that is what DEP's team is claiming is slanderous. So on the surface it does appear to be helpful to DEP's side. That said there's almost no way to know why the jury asked that question. And as far as jury questions go potentially do you foresee more questions to be asked from this jury as they continue to deliberate? There's not really a cap on how many they could they could ask right? There's no cap and they could certainly continue to deliberate and as long as they have disagreements back there in the jury room about any particular issue the jury can continue to send out questions to try to resolve those issues so the judge can point them in the right direction either by directing them to certain pieces of evidence or to the law which is important to that particular question. Yeah I think back on this trial and I mean this was weeks and weeks and weeks of evidence that was presented. Different photos, different people. I would not be surprised if they asked for more clarification. And speaking of the jury itself I want to break down the demographics. This is according to Court TV. The jury is comprised of five men, two women. They appear to range in age from about their 20s to possibly over the age of 60. How substantial is demographic going to weigh into this? This is you've dealt with many like sexual abuse, physical abuse cases in the past. Typically how does it sway when you have more men or more women in the jury? As a general rule and listen I mean this is a sweeping generalization that I'm about to make but women tend to scrutinize statements by women more strictly. In other words oftentimes we have found in our own trial experience that women will be test the evidence that they're hearing from female witnesses more closely than perhaps the male jurors. But there are certainly circumstances where that's absolutely not the case and not true and it's always a fool's errand to judge what we think of a particular gender based on something like gender for example. So it's really impossible to know without knowing a whole lot more about these jurors backgrounds. Right and there was jury selection that went into this which I'm sure a lot of research went into going into the chart not the charges but the possible verdict in this defamation. What potentially could Amber Heard face and what potentially could Johnny Duck face? There's a lot of possible outcomes in this. So many possible outcomes. Both of them could walk away with no findings. In other words nothing that they don't win anything in terms of the courtroom. They could both lose the trial. They could also both win the trial and there could also be an example where one side gets what they want and the other side doesn't and essentially what these parties have asked for in terms of damages is also completely up in the air because the jurors at the end of the day can do whatever they feel is appropriate if they do find a party responsible for defamation. And we can only wait and see on this how long do you think it's going to take? No one really has a clear indication. No one's inside of that deliberation room but do you do you foresee this going for the rest of the week? I think it's quite possible. Like you pointed out earlier there was a lot of information in this trial. This was a long trial with lots of witnesses, many photographs, lots of evidence. I think that it's possible that the deliberations could go on and on as this jury carefully considers all of the evidence before them. All right Nicole the board any last thoughts as we move forward in this defamation case? I cannot wait to hear after the fact from this jury panel although sometimes you don't exactly get the details you're hoping for but what information they thought sitting there in that jury box was important to consider to reach the verdict that they ultimately reach. Thank you so much for being with us here on the show. We'll be bringing you back when we learn a little bit more. Thanks for having me.