I am surprised they didn't get copies of the judge's instructions. Is that a New York state practice? In Georgia, we got printed copies of the instructions for each juror, so we could refer to them during deliberation.
Yeah in PA at least we got one copy (for the foreman) of basically everything that we needed - counts, definitions, etc. Basically all of the info because the judge wasn't going to repeat basically anything else.
This was basically my experience when I was on a jury in Ohio as well. Detailed definitions of the charges, a "roadmap" if you will of how we were to go about deciding innocence or guilt on each count, etc. Also all the evidence we saw at trial was given to us to look at/watch as much as we needed to in the juror room.
I'll say I guess thats where PA is different - basically everything we saw in the court room (testimony, readings from either side, video) was only able to be given to us once - when it was brought up in the court room. We weren't allowed to really ask any questions afterwards or see the evidence again once we went into deliberations. We were only allowed to take notes basically. They warned us in the beginning to make sure to take vociferous notes bc almost everything had to be based upon memory. Which to me felt like a really bad way of doing things, b/c even your notes are not the same as actually seeing the evidence again.
We tried asking a few questions but the judge was rather vague on a lot of it. Either she reminded us to go off of our memory and that she couldn't read something back or that certain definitions - if they weren't in the instructions given to us - were basically on us to figure out (I believe we tried to find the distinction between carry and possess. There was a definition for one and not the other. She didn't give us a definiton for the other lol
