(CBS News) After 9 days of deliberation, a jury has found John Edwards not guilty on one of six charges of campaign finance corruption brought against him. A mistrial has been declared on the other five counts. After initially announcing Thursday afternoon that it had reached a unanimous verdict on only one of six charges against Edwards, the judge sent the jury back to continue deliberations on the remaining five counts. Shortly after that, the jurors said they were deadlocked on those counts, at which point the judge announced a verdict of not guilty on the third count against Edwards, which charged that he had accepted and received illegal campaign contributions in 2008 from Rachel "Bunny" Mellon.
The judge then declared a mistrial on the remaining five counts.
"Edwards and Edwards' lawyers must have had a sigh of relief when the not guilty was announced -- you can hear it from here to Chicago," said Stan Goldman, a law professor and criminal law expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.
The prosecution must now decide whether to retry the remaining five charges, unless the judge dismisses the case in the name of justice. But after the lengthy, controversial, and at times fraught trial, Goldman wonders "if it would make any sense to do it again."
"This is not a murder case. This is not kidnapping. This is a close call on a political financing case where experts in the area seem to be highly divided on whether a rule was violated," Goldman said. "It strikes me as an abuse of discretion to retry a case like this unless a jury was hung 11-1 or 10-2."
The former North Carolina senator, two-time presidential candidate and 2004 Democratic vice presidential nominee was indicted in a federal court last June on six counts alleging his complicity in a scheme to cover up an extramarital affair and its resulting pregnancy while he was running for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. The indictment against Edwards charged that nearly $1 million worth of contributions provided by prominent Edwards donors Rachel "Bunny" Mellon and Fred Baron, which went toward helping former Edwards mistress Rielle Hunter and their child, amounted to campaign contributions because they were made with the purpose of protecting Edwards' presidential candidacy.
The Edwards campaign did not file the more than $900,000 as campaign contributions, and Baron said before his death in 2008 that he had provided the funds on his own, without telling Edwards. The money was not given to Edwards or Hunter directly, but rather funneled through several different people, including a former aide, Andrew Young, who at one point attempted to help Edwards cover up the affair with Hunter by claiming paternity of Hunter's child with Edwards. Young used much of the money to pay for the construction of a $1.6 million home for his family.
Pivotal to the prosecution's case was proving that the funds did qualify as campaign contributions and that Edwards accepted them with the knowledge that in doing so he was breaking the law.
Over the course of the nearly month-long trial, prosecutors argued that Edwards knew about the so-called "Bunny money," and that he was aware it was being used to help keep Hunter out of the public eye. This argument was supported by Young, who housed Hunter during part of the 2008 campaign, and later wrote a book accusing Edwards of masterminding the cover-up. During several days of fraught testimony, Young argued that Edwards had recruited him to solicit secret donations for the purpose of covering up his affair.
Edwards' defense team argued that while the former Senator was undeniably guilty of lying to his family about his affair, he did not knowingly violate federal campaign laws. Edwards' lawyers posited that Young, who was granted immunity in the trial, went behind Edwards' back to swindle Mellon out of hundreds of thousands of dollars for his personal benefit.
Neither Edwards, Hunter, nor Edwards' daughter Cate took the stand.
