Jurors in the Atlanta Public Schools test-cheating case will return Wednesday for an eighth day of deliberations.
Prosecutors said the jury seems to be focusing on the last of six schools at the center of the long trial and they declined the judge’s offer on Tuesday to ask jurors where they were in deliberations.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Jerry Baxter said he suspected members of the jury may be struggling, based on the questions they have asked over the past few days.
“I think there are some disagreements,” Baxter said.
The exchange about jury deliberations came after lawyers discussed a request from the six men and six women for copies of the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test given at Benteen Elementary School.
In the morning jurors asked about the CRCT given at Dunbar Elementary, and in the afternoon they asked about the CRCT given at Benteen.
“They’re being very methodical,” prosecutor Clint Rucker said.
By the time jurors headed home on Tuesday, they had spent 47 hours over seven days debating the racketeering case against 12 former educators.
Judge Baxter was the first to raise the possibility of asking the jury for a status report.
Defense attorney Keith Adams, who represents former Dunbar Elementary School teacher Diane Buckner-Webb, said he wanted the question posed.
But prosecutor Fani Willis said it was too soon. For example, she said, she had prosecuted single-defendant murder cases on which juries had deliberated four or five days.
Baxter ultimately decided not to request a status report and dispatched members of his staff to fetch the requested test answer sheets. Baxter said there was “a large quantity” of tests for the jurors to inspect.
Jury selection in the case started in early August, and 2,000 pieces of evidence and 162 witnesses were presented in the months since opening statements in late September.
The dozen former teachers and administrators are charged with racketeering, which has a maximum punishment of 20 years in prison.
Eleven also face other felonies, including theft by taking, influencing witnesses, false swearings, and false statements and writings. Those lesser felonies carry maximum punishments of 10 years in prison.
Tamara Cotman, a former Atlanta Public Schools regional director, is the only defendant not facing lesser felony charges because she was the first defendant to go on trial in the scandal — and she was found not guilty. A jury acquitted Cotman in September 2013 of charges that she influenced a witness who claimed Cotman had instructed principals to tell investigators to “go to hell.” She now awaits a verdict on the racketeering charge.
Former Superintendent Beverly Hall was also charged with racketeering in the alleged conspiracy, but she did not go on trial with the others because she was being treated for Stage IV breast cancer. Hall died four weeks ago, after testimony had been completed but before the case was given to the jury.
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