Deadlocked jury means mistrial in Palatine man's sex abuse trial

After more than 12 hours of deliberations and four appeals to the court by the jury indicating they had reached an impasse, a Cook County judge late Thursday granted the defense motion for a mistrial in the case of a 29-year-old Palatine man accused of sexually abusing a child.

Defendant Baldomero Garcia, of the 1500 block of Norway Lane, remains in Cook County jail on charges of predatory criminal sexual abuse of a young girl in 2008. He next appears in a Rolling Meadows courtroom on May 20. It was unclear whether prosecutors will retry him.

His co-defendant was acquitted of similar charges earlier this year before Cook County Circuit Court Judge John Scotillo, who also presided over Garcia's trial.

The vote was 11 to 1 in favor of conviction, defense attorneys said. A verdict must be unanimous.

Cook County Assistant Public Defender Larry Kugler said no physical evidence links his client to the complaining witness, who Kugler said did not show physical evidence of trauma. Kugler also challenged Baldomero's signed statement to police, saying that it was written by a Cook County assistant state's attorney in English, which the Guatemala-born Garcia does not speak, and then translated for him.

Cook County Assistant State's Attorney Mike Clarke had indicated that the defendant's own words would convict him when he introduced the statement, in which he said Garcia admitted to abusing the child four times.

Interviewed after court adjourned, a juror from Palatine questioned whether the statement was translated properly and wondered why the police did not obtain the services of a professional interpreter instead of relying on a Spanish-speaking police officer to translate.

A juror from Buffalo Grove wondered if the defendant might have been intimidated into what might have been a false confession. But a third juror said the majority of the group found the false confession theory implausible because too many people - including witnesses, police officers and prosecutors - would have had to lie.

That said, the third juror added that he would have welcomed seeing a videotape of the police interview. Police typically only videotape interviews involving murder suspects.

The same juror said that initially, several members of the six-man, six-woman jury leaned toward a not-guilty verdict, citing as a reason the lack of physical evidence and the apparent absence of physical injury to the complaining witness. Moreover, several witnesses did not make good impressions, he said.

But by the end of the first day of deliberations, he said, two jurors were holding out for a not-guilty verdict. In the end it was only one.

The sole holdout juror did not consider the testimony from the complaining witness credible and questioned the veracity of the confession.

Despite the long hours and sometimes heated discussions, the jurors were civil to each other, said the holdout.

"We did our job."