Though they deliberated for more than 12 hours last week, it took only one vote for jurors to side with the Salt Lake County sheriff's deputy who shot Stevie Manzanares in the head five years ago.

Jury foreman Keith C. Fenton said rather than take a vote at the start of deliberations, the 12 jurors first sifted through their notes and reviewed all the testimony and evidence."Our first vote was the last vote," Fenton said in an interview with the Deseret News. "I think we all felt pretty good about that."

The jury's attitudes and actions will be carefully scrutinized in the next few weeks as Manzanares' lawyers decide whether to appeal the verdict, which contradicted the finding of a different jury last year.

The jury in the first trial concluded after three hours of deliberations that deputy Vaughn Allen had been too quick on the trigger when he shot Manzanares in a Smith's Food and Drug Store parking lot on Aug. 7, 1992.

According to testimony in both trials, Manzanares and a friend were waiting in a car while another friend went inside the store to steal a case of beer. When Allen and deputy Kent Mattingly arrived on the scene, they approached Manzanares from opposite sides.

Allen said he saw a shiny object in Manzanares' hand and, believing it to be a gun, fired his weapon to protect Mattingly. Manzanares said he had just stashed a can of beer and had both his hands on the steering wheel when he was shot. Manzanares, who was 18 at the time, suffered permanent brain injury.

The first jury decided Allen should have held off until he was sure about the gun, and awarded Manzanares $555,770 in damages. However, U.S. District Judge Dee Benson set the verdict aside and ordered a new trial after learning that one of the jurors hadn't disclosed that her own son was killed in a gang shootout in a Smith's parking lot.

Manzanares' attorneys, Edward Havas and Colin King, declared after the second verdict was announced last week they do intend to challenge Benson's decision regarded the first trial. They said they will be deciding in the next few weeks whether to appeal the second verdict.

Any decision is likely to include an assessment of juror attitudes. And according to Fenton, the lawyers will find that the jurors in the second trial were diligent and fair, reviewing the evidence and testimony over two days of deliberations.

One pivotal piece of evidence appears to have been the testimony of Mattingly. Fenton said that with Manzanares giving one version of his movements and Allen another, he and other jurors relied heavily on what Mattingly saw.

"He (Mattingly) said he saw up and down motion (of Manzanares' hand)," Fenton said. "Mattingly testified that he was also very suspicious and was bringing his own weapon up when the shot rang out."

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Though Mattingly's testimony was important, jurors based their verdict on the "totality of the evidence," Fenton said. For example, Fenton said he was persuaded that Allen and Mattingly had reason to be wary because what they saw at the scene looked more like the setup for an armed robbery than a shoplifting.

There were "lookouts" waiting outside the store, the motor was running in the getaway car, it appeared that attempts had been made to conceal the license plate, and the car took off when the officers arrived.

"You could see where they (police) would think it was too elaborate to be a typical beer run," Fenton said.

"We felt that under the circumstances - because of everything that had led up to it - when Allen saw Stevie turning toward Mattingly and saw something flash in his hand, he had reason to believe that Mattingly was in danger."

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