Yahoo says the jury in the R. Kelly child pornography case has reached a verdict after less than one day of deliberation.  Judge Vincent Gaughan is scheduled to read the verdict today at 3:30 eastern time.

UPDATE - CBS in Chicago says he has been found Not Guilty on all 14 counts.  Apparently the jury felt there was not enough evidence to convict him.  If only there had been some record of the event.  Maybe a photograph linking him to the crime.  Or better yet, a reel of multiple images.  A video, captured on tape.  A “video tape”, if you will.



After just two days and 12 witnesses, the defense rested yesterday in the R. Kelly child pornography case.  Neither Kelly nor the woman who is said to have been 13 when she had sex with Kelly ever testified.  This is not to say the trial is over, as today the prosecution will bring back a video expert to contradict claims by the defense about a mole on Kellys back.  The Chicago Sun Times says…

Prosecutors said Monday they planned to recall to the witness stand Grant Fredericks, who previously testified that the videotape showed a dark spot on the lower back of the man in the video. The spot "corresponds" with a mole on Kelly's back, Fredericks told jurors.
Last week, Kelly's team presented its own video expert, Charles Palm, who showed a copy of the tape in which dark spots seemed to appear and then disappear from the man's back. He dismissed the spots as "video noise."

I think it's safe to say the defense is fucked when their big plan is based around a mole that even they admit you can see most of the time.  It seems unlikely that "video noise" would make a black spot appear exactly where Kelly has a mole.  Couldn’t it just as easily be "video noise" that made the mole not visible some of the time.   At this point the defense might as well just throw a bunch of money in the air and then run away while everyone scrambles to catch it.

The prosecution rested yesterday in the R. Kelly child pornography trial in Chicago.  Their final witness was a 27-year-old woman named Lisa Van Allen, who testified that she had a three-way with Kelly and the alleged victim, who was around 13 at the time.  It turns out that’s illegal.  EW says:

Van Allen testified that Kelly taped their trysts and alleged that last year he offered her $250,000 to recover one of the tapes. She told the court that Kelly seemed obsessed with taping his exploits and claims he carried around a bag full of the homemade videos. ''He carried it everywhere with him,'' she said. ''Wherever he was at, the bag would follow him.''

The defense beings tomorrow, although let's face it they’re screwed.   You're not gonna find very many people in favor of fucking little kids.  And the ones who are will probably not defend it while on a jury in a courtroom surrounded by cops and jail cells.  Trust me on this.  Don’t worry about how I know.  Mind your own business.  No, you're a pervert.  No you are.

TMZ said this morning that the R Kelly child pornography / statutory rape trial is about to get immensely more interesting.

The bombshell witness in the R. Kelly trial -– a woman who claims she had a three-way with R. and the alleged victim – is due to testify today.  The defense is clearly rattled – they tried to force her removal from the witness list completely, but the judge nixed that. The woman, who lives in Georgia, is expected to ID the girl on the pee-pee tape and to verify that she was a minor at the time.  Yesterday, a woman who worked for Kelly reluctantly ID'd the singer as the guy in the tape.

I guess this could maybe somehow be worse for Kelly, but only if the girls were white, and the trial was somehow moved to Alabama in the 1950’s.

R Kelly’s child pornography trial began yesterday in Chicago.  This case is not to be confused with the case in 2003 when he was indicted on 12 counts of child pornography in Florida after cops found digital pictures of him having sex with an underage girl, or when he married Aaliya when she was 15.  This is different.  This time, he faces 12 counts of soliciting a minor for child pornography in Illinois.  His arrest came after a tape was anonymously mailed to the Chicago Sun-Times, a tape that allegedly shows Kelly having sex with a 13-year-old girl, and yesterday the prosecutors opened with a bang by showing the tape to the jury.  What a sexy trial!  The New York Daily News says…

The body of evidence in the R.Kelly kiddie-porn case could come down to this: a mole on the R&B raunchmeister's back.
During opening arguments in his sex-tape trial Tuesday, the defense said the singer couldn't possibly be the man who cavorted with a girl as young as 13.
Kelly, 41, has a "significant" mole on his lower middle back, one that's been there since childhood, said lawyer Sam Adam Jr.
And the man seen performing a variety of explicit sex acts on the raw video made between 1998 and 2000?
"There is no mole on his back," Adam told jurors in a packed Chicago courtroom.
A prosecutor told the jury the tape was an R. Kelly production from start to finish, one that the Grammy winner "created, staged, produced and starred in."

Stuff like this is why I rarely have sex with underage girls anymore.  Keep your laws off my body!