Why The Jury Acquitted Brian Williams?

The prosecution accused Brian Williams many things, such as deceiving the public with lies, dishonoring the military and claiming valor without justification.  One of the lies he told was about travelling in a helicopter that was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade.  But after a veteran involved in the event questioned his story Williams admitted he was actually riding in another helicopter that was about 30 minutes behind the one that was hit.  He was also accused of lying about an additional three events.  These were flying to Iraq with SEAL Team Six, being in Berlin the day the wall fell and meeting the Pope.  None of these statements were true. The defense made several arguments for an acquittal such as saying Williams suffered from a sickness called “False Memory Syndrome”.  They also argued that NBC had used Brian Williams as an escape goat after giving him things to read off of a TelePrompTer that were lies.  In addition NBC put pressure him to lie.

Brian Williams was charged with 6 different crimes.  For three of these charges the jury voted to convict but on the other three they voted to acquit.  In order to convict Williams the jury would have had to have found him guilty on a majority of the six charges. He was acquitted of treason, corrupting others and abusing power. He was found guilty of deceiving the public, dishonoring the military and stealing valor. In the rules used for most jury trials in America Williams would have gone to jail after being convicted of three charges.  But the rules for the trial we had in class required that for a conviction the defendant had to be found guilty of more than half the charges.  Since it was a tie between conviction and acquitted Brian Williams was acquitted of all the charges.