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Jurors: We Had Reasonable Doubt

The jurors who acquitted Michael Jackson of child molestation had harsh words for the accuser's mother, who made them uncomfortable during her jumbled and volatile testimony.

Jurors said they were especially put off when the mother snapped her fingers at them while on the stand. "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, Eleanor Crook, a retired widow.

"I think she put us all in an awkward position. She was really in our faces, talking directly to us," said juror No. 6, Tammy Bolton on CBS News' The Early Show Tuesday. "I think it made a lot of us feel a little uncomfortable."

"The credibility of the witnesses was very poor," said Raymond Hultman, juror No. 1, also on The Early Show.

When jurors spoke Monday 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. Later, several used their names during interviews with the news media.

Hultman said he believed Jackson may have molested at least two boys — but not the accuser.

"Everybody has beliefs, and I think what was challenging to all of the jurors in this case was to be able to separate our beliefs from what the evidence showed," he told Early Show co-anchor René Syler. "And in the end, we had to weigh the evidence and if there was any reasonable doubt, that was the decision that we needed to make."

"I always had a good feeling about these jurors," said lead defense attorney Thomas Mesereau, also on CBS. "I felt they were very independent-minded, very courageous people ... I was confident that this jury would follow the law and do what was right."

The foreman, later identified as Paul Rodriguez, said jurors made a plan from the start of deliberations that they were going to treat Jackson like any other individual and avoid being star-struck. After that, "we were able to deal with it just as fairly as we could as with anybody else."

They also found no "smoking gun" in the evidence.

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

They also had trouble with the prosecution's timeline of events. Prosecutors 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.

"The timeline was really a concern," said juror No. 3, a 50-year-old woman.

"There was times when you were just sitting there going, 'Man, come on, get it over with,'" said Michael Stevens, juror No. 7, on The Early Show.

Coccoz, 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.

Rodriguez 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.'"

The mass of about 2,200 credentialed media representatives who gathered for the verdict surprised jurors. But juror No. 1 (Hultman) 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 copious notes to follow the timeline of events.

"It was very stressful. It was a lot on us," said Bolton Tuesday. "I think we all felt the pressure. We knew we had thousand of people out there, millions of people out there, watching us, looking at us, waiting for us to say anything. It was hard. We were all under a lot of stress."

But CBSNews.com Legal Analyst Andrew Cohen says the jurors performed admirably.

"This is a verdict that takes some guts to be the jury that acquits Michael Jackson, because people have this perception of him as being not only a freak and a creep but probably a child molester. Well, this jury said 'No, based on the evidence we saw, we can't say that,'" Cohen said.

"They have to live with that verdict for the rest of their lives, but I think it took guts to do it and I have to tell you, I think it's a verdict that they can defend quite easily," he added.

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