No Libby verdict after 3 days of deliberations

updated 5:19 p.m. ET Feb. 23, 2007

WASHINGTON - A jury considering the perjury and obstruction charges against former White House aide Lewis Libby completed a third day of deliberations Friday without reaching a verdict.

The Washington jury of eight women and four men has so far spent about 18 1/2 hours over three days reviewing 14 days of testimony after getting final instructions Wednesday from presiding U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton.

The jury is due to resume deliberations Monday.

The jurors have so far sent out just two brief notes in which they ask for some supplies. They wanted a large flip chart, masking tape, Post-it notes and a document with pictures of the witnesses.

Libby, who was Vice President Cheney's chief of staff at the time, is charged with lying and obstructing the investigation into who leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame. Prosecutors say the administration was trying to discredit Plame's husband, who was a critic of the administration's rationale for invading Iraq.

A total of 19 witnesses testified at trial. Libby is charged with five felonies: two counts of making false statements to FBI agents, two counts of perjury before a grand jury, one count of obstructing the CIA leak investigation.

The maximum sentence if convicted on each of the 5 charges is 30 years in federal prison, though he'd likely get far less under federal sentencing guidelines.

Libby is not charged with the leak of Valerie Plame's name to reporters. No one has been charged with the leak itself.

Note-taking flaws
During the monthlong trial of former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, notes have been used by FBI agents, journalists or White House aides.

But notes aren't as reliable as one might think. That's true whether they're scrawled in the margins of a business meeting agenda, typed on a secretary's laptop, scribbled on a patient's chart or carefully recorded from a lecture hall blackboard.

Yet, people are charged, front-page articles are written and public policies are decided in part based on those notes. If they are flawed, whose can be believed?

"Based on what I've heard in this trial, I don't know if notes are the best evidence of anything," U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton commented midway through the trial.

Jurors, who begin their third day of deliberations in Libby's perjury and obstruction case Friday, must decide how much weight to put on notes that were sometimes sloppy and often inconsistent.

Word filtering
Researchers who have studied note-taking have known its flaws for years. Take college students, for example. Their memories are at their peak, their success depends largely on their note-taking abilities and they practice every day.

Yet only about 30 percent of important classroom information makes it into a typical student's notebook, said Kenneth A. Kiewra, a University of Nebraska educational psychology professor who studies note-taking.

Part of the problem, Kiewra said, is that words are filtered before they make it onto the page. Things we already know often don't get written, he said, nor do things we don't totally understand. And impressions can skew our notes. In that way, notes can become personal snapshots, useful for jogging memory, more than an official record.

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