Sean “Diddy” Combs is likely to be barred from his personal trial, the decide stated Thursday in a bombshell second.
With the jury absent, Choose Arun Subramanian warned protection attorneys in a sidebar that he would possibly exclude the defendant from the Decrease Manhattan courtroom if he continued to look, nod or make facial expressions at jurors, CNN reported.
The admonition got here after Subramanian stated he noticed Combs taking a look at and “nodding vigorously” towards the jury twice throughout right now’s cross-examination of prosecution witness Bryana Bongolan, who had instructed the court docket Wednesday that the defendant had dangled her off a Seventeenth-story balcony in 2016.
Subramanian instructed protection lawyer Marc Agnifilo that he had been clear that there have been to be no theatrics throughout Combs’ trial on federal costs of racketeering, intercourse trafficking, transportation to have interaction in prostitution and extra. “I regarded and I noticed your consumer trying on the jury and nodding vigorously,” CNN reported the decide telling the lawyer. “It’s completely unacceptable.”
Requested by the jurist if it could occur once more, Agnifilo stated per CNN that it could not. Subramanian stated that if there was any additional juror interplay by Combs, he would possibly instruct the jury about it and, probably, contemplate barring the defendant from the courtroom.
Combs, 55, faces as much as life in jail if convicted.
On the four-week mark of the trial, the jury of eight males and 4 girls within the courtroom has heard specific and generally heartrending testimony about rapes, emotional and bodily violence, blackmail, and filmed drug-juiced “freak-offs” from Combs’ former longtime girlfriend Cassie Ventura and his ex-personal assistant “Mia.”
