Welcome to the New York Times Popcast. It is Wednesday, July 2nd, around 1 p.m. I'm John Caramanica, a critic at the New York Times. And I'm Joe Costcarelli. I'm a reporter at the New York Times. We're coming to you quickly because the verdict in the Sean Combs trial has just been handed down a couple of hours ago. Combs was acquitted of most of the charges, which he was facing. He was found guilty of transporting people for prostitution, but he was acquitted on sex trafficking charges and acquitted on racketeering conspiracy charges. Joe, the jury started deliberating Monday. Yesterday, it had returned some notes

that suggested that there might be some unpersuadable members of the jury on at least one of the

charges. Can you talk through a little bit about what's happening in the last 24 hours?

Yeah, so the jurors had been in there over the span of more than a day.

End of the day yesterday, they came back with a note to the judge in the case,

and they said that they had reached verdicts on four of the five counts,

but that they were stuck on the first count.

That's the most complicated, the racketeering conspiracy charge. And

yeah, they said there were unspersuadable opinions on either side. Both sides, the defense and the

prosecution, agreed with the judge that the jury should keep deliberating. But when that note came

in yesterday, our reporters in the courthouse, day in and day out for

the last eight weeks, that's been Julia Jacobs and Ben Cesario, with the help of a couple

stringers in and out of the courtroom. They described the scene as very grim for Sean

Combs and his family, his legal team. He was looking down, his hands in his lap,

those lawyers were putting their hands on his shoulders. There was some indication that if the

jurors had found verdicts on four of the five counts, but were only stuck on what many people

saw as the most complex count, that it wasn't looking good for him.

They returned this morning, around 9 a.m., they started deliberating again, and in less than a

couple of hours, they came back with what I think is a pretty shocking, not guilty on the

major crimes here, I think, both from the testimony, from the women at the heart of this case,

which we'll get into, and just the overall idea that federal prosecutors don't tend to lose

cases. The conviction rate is very high. This is a partial guilty verdict. I don't think it is being

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