Juror No. 10, a 68-year-old White man, settled in for a long ordeal. Instead, by Tuesday morning, the panel had quickly coalesced around a guilty verdict, he said in an interview.
“There was a lot of key evidence we had to go back and look at,” said the juror, who declined to give his name over concerns that he could face public recriminations. Among the most important evidence, he said, was the firearms transaction record that included a question asking, in present tense, whether the buyer was using or addicted to a controlled substance.
Biden checked the “no” box — an answer prosecutors called a lie but defense attorneys argued was true because Biden believed he had quit drugs on the day in October 2018 when he purchased the .38-caliber Colt revolver.
“In our minds, that didn’t play a big factor. That was only one day,” the juror said of the defense argument. “And we all know that Hunter relapsed so many times, so at what point do you say you’re not an addict? And leading up to that, Hunter was trying to buy drugs right up to the day before he bought” the gun.\
The jury took three hours, split over the two days, to unanimously vote to convict Biden on three felony counts, a decision that could reverberate in the 2024 presidential election. President Biden altered his schedule Tuesday to travel to Wilmington after the verdict, with first lady Jill Biden comforting their son in the courthouse.
The jury included a substitute teacher, a former Secret Service employee and multiple gun owners. Six were men and six were women. Most were people of color, and their ages appeared to range from mid-20s to 70s. Their names were not made public by the court, an effort to protect their safety, authorities said.
Juror No. 10 said that despite the historic nature of the conviction, he did not think the case had been politicized inside the courtroom. President Biden’s “name was brought up once during trial, when it sunk in a little bit: The sitting president’s son is on trial,” he said. “That was hard, but you kind of put it out of your mind.”
Some jurors confessed that they didn’t initially recognize the first lady, who was a constant figure sitting behind Hunter Biden in the courtroom gallery.
“People were saying, ‘I didn’t even know what President Biden’s wife looked like,’” juror No. 10 said, adding that he felt badly that Hunter Biden’s daughter, Naomi Biden, was called to testify.
The juror added that Hunter Biden should not be imprisoned. He noted that Biden did not press charges against Hallie Biden, his late brother Beau’s widow, after learning from police that she had thrown his firearm into a public trash can 11 days after he purchased it.
Hunter Biden also told authorities he did not want the gun back, a decision that might have helped lead to his indictment years later, the juror said.
“I really don’t think that Hunter belongs in jail,” he said. “Had he taken possession of that gun, we might not even have had a trial.”
Though Hunter Biden did not testify, the juror said that audio clips played in court of him narrating his biography, “Beautiful Things,” proved damning.
“Hunter didn’t testify, but by all counts he did testify through the book because that was his words,” he said. “And he chose to have it on audio, so when you have it on audio, and he’s writing that book and he’s telling you, ‘I’m an addict’ — that has to play a part. You can’t help but think of him admitting to himself that he was an addict.”
