Tears welled in the eyes of several jurors Thursday night as Cook County Circuit Court Judge Frank Zelezinski asked them whether they would be able to reach a unanimous decision in the trial of Jemetric Nicholson.
Zelezinski polled seven of the 12 jurors before one said he was certain that more discussion could break the deadlock. The judge sent them home for a third night, and they will return Friday morning to resume deliberations.
Nicholson, 28, a felon who’s currently imprisoned, is charged with first-degree murder in the September 2006 death Thomas Cook, a Metra police officer who was shot twice in the back of the head in his car by the 147th Street Metra station in Harvey.
The jury was given the case at 4 p.m. Tuesday, and it has met for more than 16 hours, heading into Friday. Jurors have made multiple requests for information in what appears to be a contentious and difficult debate over Nicholson’s guilt.
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Jurors on Thursday asked Zelezinski if it would be possible to use Google or any kind of map to look at two south suburbs that are involved in the trial. An aerial map of Harvey was submitted as evidence in the trial, which started last week. Zelezinski said jurors could use that map but no other.
Jurors also asked if they could know where a white Lincoln was towed, a car allegedly used by Nicholson and another man in a shootout with police earlier in the day that Cook was killed. That information was not presented at trial and will not be made available to the jury, the judge ruled.
Earlier Thursday, the jurors asked to see transcripts of trial testimony by two witnesses, one of whom is testifying as part of a plea agreement with the state for a reduced sentence.
Prosecutors allege that Nicholson pulled the trigger, ending the life of Cook, 43, a veteran police officer and father of two. There is no physical evidence tying Nicholson to the killing, but the prosecution presented testimony and circumstantial evidence that it told jurors was enough to find Nicholson guilty.
Nicholson testified last week, denying shooting Cook, and his defense emphasized the lack of physical evidence of his guilt.
Jeremy Lloyd, one of the two witnesses whose testimony jurors sought to review via transcript, had told the jury that he watched as Nicholson pointed a gun at Cook while he sat in a marked car. Cook, the first Metra cop to be killed in the line of duty, was on special detail the night he was murdered because of a series of robberies in the area around the train station.
Lloyd agreed to testify against Nicholson as part of a plea deal in which he pleaded guilty to acting as a lookout in Cook’s death and for his role in the attempted murder of a Harvey officer that same day.
Nick Swedberg is a freelance reporter.