The second day of testimony is under way at the murder retrial of Quinton Tellis, the man accused of burning 19-year-old Jessica Chambers alive in Courtland, Mississippi, in 2014.
When Tellis was tried last year, it ended in a mistrial when a jury couldn’t come to a decision. A key argument for the defense, then and now, is the fact that multiple first responders testified to hearing Jessica Chambers say the name “Eric” when they asked her who did this to her.
And as the Commercial Appeal reports, the jurors in the first trial didn’t appear to fully understand the instructions for arriving at a verdict. They believed that only a guilty verdict required a unanimous decision, leading to some confusion when the jurors said they had arrived at a verdict, only to reveal that they were split when the judge questioned them individually.
On Wednesday, first responders returned to that stand to testify about finding Jessica Chambers badly burned and barely clinging to life on that December night. Their testimony comes after a speech pathologist testified on Tuesday that Chambers could not have properly articulated her words due to the burns on her tongue.
Watch the proceedings live via WREG:
LIVE: DAY 2, PART THREE of the Quinton Tellis trial in the murder of Jessica Chambers
Posted by WREG News Channel 3 on Wednesday, September 26, 2018