In an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper set to air tonight on “AC 360,” one of the jurors in the Aaron Hernandez trial says the jury couldn’t prove the former NFL player was guilty of premeditated murder, but Hernandez’ “indifference” and a sense of “extreme atrocity and cruelty” led to the guilty verdict in the murder case. Another juror in the case, Jon Carlson, told Cooper video of Hernandez played at trial weighed heavily on their verdict.
“We watched the video footage at his home, later in the morning- or early afternoon- after the incident occurred and he was just lounging around by the pool and playing with the baby and just going about his regular life I mean for us to have knowledge that he was there at the time- that his close friend was murdered, personally there’s no way I could just carry on hours later like nothing ever happened. That’s indifference.”
AC360 producer Susan Chun, who assembled the shoot, was impressed by how seriously the jurors took their duties.
“What struck us is how they all seemed to arrive at the same conclusion but from different places,” Chun tells TVNewser. “Different pieces of evidence or testimony struck the jurors in different ways, but it led them all down the same path to conclude Aaron Hernandez was guilty.”
Chun also found it interesting that the jurors “referred to Hernandez as ‘Aaron,’ using his first name. They said they did so because after months of sitting in a courtroom with him, they felt like they knew him.”