read back

“It was painful to read back at times, but there’s so much hope,” he says.

“We were all ready to go home. I think it was pretty clear that they were going to keep on working. There hadn’t been any notes. The first note was a pretty complicated one about testimony, and then asking to have the charge read back to them. So that’s a jury that’s kind of in it for the long haul.”

The jury has asked for a broad range of the instructions to be read back.

Justice Merchan asks the jurors whether they want his instructions read back first, or the testimony they had requested to hear again.

Jurors can communicate with the court through notes that ask the judge, for instance, for legal guidance or to have particular excerpts of testimony read back to them.