From NPR
Jurors began deliberating Tuesday at R. Kelly's federal trial in Chicago, sorting through a month of evidence and arguments on charges accusing the singer of producing child pornography, enticing minors for sex and rigging his 2008 child porn trial.
Standing at a podium a few feet in front of jurors, Kelly attorney Jennifer Bonjean told jurors in her closing earlier Tuesday that key government witnesses were admitted liars who testified with immunity to ensure they couldn't be charged.
At times sounding indignant and raising her voice, Bonjean likened their testimony and other evidence to a cockroach and the government's case to a bowl of soup.
If a cockroach falls into soup, she said, "you don't just pull out the cockroach and eat the rest of the soup. You throw out the whole soup," said told jurors. She said of the prosecution's case: "There are just too many cockroaches."
Delivering the government's rebuttal after Bonjean's closing, prosecutor Jeannice Appenteng told jurors to remember the girls and women Kelly allegedly abused.
"When you are in the quiet of the jury room, consider the evidence in light of who is at the center of this case. Kelly's victims: Jane, Nia, Pauline, Tracy and Brittany," Appenteng said, referring to five Kelly accusers named in charging documents by their pseudonyms or first names.
Four of them testified. Brittany did not.
The prosecutor also pointed to testimony that as Kelly's fame boomed in the mid-1990s, his staff and associates increasingly geared everything they did to what Kelly wanted.
"And ladies and gentlemen, what R. Kelly wanted was to have sex with young girls," she said.
