'Relatively unusual': Maggie Haberman throws cold water on Trump lawyers' prayers

Former President Donald Trump's attorneys have openly talked about working to get a hung jury in their client's hush-money trial.

However, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman on Tuesday appeared to pour cold water on this by noting the extreme infrequency of such events.

"Some members of Trump's team, since the very start of the trial, have been noticeably confident of a hung jury," Haberman writes on the New York Times' live blog of the trial. "Todd Blanche, Trump's lead lawyer, shared his thoughts about the idea with a New York Magazine reporter who wrote a cover story about him just as the trial kicked off. The prediction that the trial will end with that outcome has been striking, particularly since hung juries, in which jurors cannot agree on a defendant's guilt or innocence, are relatively unusual."

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Statistics back up Haberman's claim.

A study by the Court Statistics Project estimates that a mere 6 percent of cases held in state courts over a three-year period ended in hung juries.

This makes hung juries far less likely than convictions, which occurred in this period 71 percent of the time, and acquittals, which occurred 19 percent of the time.

In fact, in the E. Jean Carroll civil lawsuit, a pool of New York jurors unanimously found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming her even though one juror was an admitted fan of right-wing podcaster Tim Pool.