compromise verdict

To avoid a disagreement and a new trial, a compromise verdict was arrived at.

That request was an obvious effort to forestall a compromise verdict.

Ever since the prosecutors added the new perjury counts in March, the defense has been presented with the risk of a compromise verdict.

Jurors disputed an inference that manslaughter may have been a compromise verdict.

In what is believed to have been a compromise verdict, McCoy was convicted of manslaughter.

A jury sentenced McCoy on a compromise verdict of manslaughter.

But the defense, taking a major gamble, rejected not only a plea bargain but also the idea of a compromise verdict of manslaughter.

By midafternoon on the third day, the debate over a compromise verdict of manslaughter had become testy, and several positions had hardened.

Lawyers for the city, Patricia Miller and Frank M. Esposito, both said they saw the low damages as a compromise verdict.

Leonard E. Birdsong, a former Assistant United States Attorney here, said the jury had returned "a compromise verdict."

"We're not looking for a compromise verdict here," said Bennett M. Epstein, another lawyer for Officer Carroll.

In what appeared to be a compromise verdict, the jury awarded no damages to relatives of the two homicide victims in the three shootings where it found liability.

Mr. Raucci's lawyer, Louis A. Diamond, angrily described the jury as "the worst panel in the world" and said it had reached "a compromise verdict."

Mr. Finney, the defense attorney, said he believed that the jury's verdict was meant to satisfy the racially mixed town - a "compromise verdict" - not to dispense justice.

But they insisted that the prosecution had been careful, methodical and not overconfident, and they suggested that the jury had been under intense pressure to reach a compromise verdict.

The verdict was a stunning failure for the defense, which had gambled that Ms. Woodward would be acquitted, and asked that the lesser charge of manslaughter not be allowed as a compromise verdict.

Outside the courthouse, Officer DiGuglielmo's lawyer, David L. Lewis, said he did not regret his decision not to allow the jury a compromise verdict of manslaughter, choosing instead to go for an outright acquittal.

The rationale of the court was stated: "That it is the duty of the jury not to reach compromised verdicts based on sympathy for the defendant, or to appease holdouts, but to render a just verdict by applying the facts to the law it is charged."

Afterward, Rusty Hardin, the chief defense lawyer for Andersen, moved for a mistrial, saying that given the long deliberations, the judge's ruling could give the jurors an excuse for a compromise verdict that was reached simply for the purpose of allowing them to go home.

Then was slight momentum toward a compromise verdict of voluntav manslaughter defined under Idaho law as "the unlawful killing J a human being, without malice, upon a sudden quarrel or heat i passion" but Jimmie Hurley and a few others held firm on raw murder.

Mr. Hirschfeld said he would pay even more money, $5,000, to the sole holdout juror whom others on the panel blamed for blocking a compromise verdict in which Mr. Hirschfeld's businesses would have been found guilty but he would have personally been acquitted.