Advertisement Jury foreman in trial of SC officer charged with murder discusses deliberations Dorsey Montgomery II discusses deliberations in Michael Slager trial Share Shares Copy Link Copy

The jury foreman in the trial of the former North Charleston police officer charged with shooting an unarmed motorist spoke Thursday morning on "The Today Show." Michael Slager is charged in the shooting death of 50-year-old Walter Scott, who was shot five times in the back last year while running from Slager during a traffic stop in North Charleston. Slager’s murder trial ended in a hung jury on Monday. Dorsey Montgomery II said that when he started deliberating, he was ready to convict Slager of murder. He said that after looking at the evidence, reading the laws and looking at the evidence, the jury came to the conclusion that the shooting was not malicious. “(Slager) had a brief disturbance and reason for that moment, so based on the law, that would be classified as manslaughter, voluntary manslaughter,” Montgomery said. Montgomery also addressed a letter that a juror sent to the judge on Dec. 2 that said he or she could not consider a guilty verdict. “Come to find out the media misconstrued the letter. When that letter was submitted on that Friday, it was because we had one individual who was just deadlocked that he wasn’t changing, but yet we had five individuals who were undecided,” Montgomery said. He said that because of that, he told the judge that he believed the jury could continue to deliberate to see if other jurors could sway the juror who wrote the letter and get the undecided jurors to make a decision. Matt Lauer asked Montgomery, the only black juror, if he believed that race played a role in the deliberations and the outcome of the trial. “Due to the society we live in, race will always be a factor, but at that point in time, I do believe some jurors may have had that in their mind, but a majority of them didn’t have anything in reference to race that may have played a factor in the decision,” Montgomery said. Solicitor Scarlett Wilson has said that she will retry the case.