Jury deadlocked after four-day deliberation in Aissa trial
BINGHAMTON, N.Y. (WIVT/WBGH) – Jurors say they're deadlocked in the trial of a Pennsylvania man accused of setting a fire that killed a teenager 14 years ago.
Just before leaving yesterday, the jury notified Judge Carol Cocchiola that they could not come to an agreement on a unanimous verdict for 39-year-old Jeremiah Raub.
Raub is charged with felony murder and two counts of arson in the death of 17-year-old Jeffrey Aissa who died in a massive house fire in the early morning hours of Saint Patrick's Day in 2011.
12 years later, investigators working on a lead in the cold case visited Raub at his home in New Milford, PA where he eventually broke down and confessed to the crime.
Jurors saw nearly five hours of Raub's videotaped confession in which he admitted to setting fire to a recycling bin on the front porch of the Aissa home on Milford Street.
Raub's defense attorney argued that it was an internalized false confession, resulting from his faulty memory of the evening and the suggestions of investigators.
The prosecution counters that Raub provided details only the perpetrator would know.
The case is based on that confession and another back in 2011 to a former girlfriend, Nicole Manderville, who never came forward to police, as well as some circumstantial evidence.
Yesterday, members of the jury indicated that some opposed convicting Raub in the absence of physical evidence incriminating him.
The prosecution says any physical evidence, such as fingerprints or DNA, would have been incinerated in the fire.
Cocchiola sent the jury back to continue deliberating and asked them to start over with an open mind.
Raub faces 25 years to life in prison if convicted.
Ithaca man arrested on arson charge after months-long investigation
NY HEAT Act reintroduced in the NYS Senate
Jury deadlocked after four-day deliberation in Aissa trial
National Wear Red Day raises awareness for heart health
Broome County AOH hosting Irish historian Davy Holden
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
7 hours ago
- Yahoo
Disorder breaks out in Northern Ireland for third straight night
By Conor Humphries BALLYMENA, Northern Ireland (Reuters) -Public disorder broke out in different parts of Northern Ireland for the third successive night on Wednesday, as rioters attacked police with petrol bombs in the main flashpoint of Ballymena and a fire was started at a leisure centre in the town of Larne. Hundreds of masked rioters injured police and set homes and cars on fire in the town of Ballymena, 45 kilometres (28 miles) from Belfast, during the previous two nights in what police condemned as "racist thuggery." Riot police and armoured vans blocked roads in Ballymena on Wednesday evening as a crowd of hundreds watched on. About two dozen masked youths threw some rocks, fireworks and petrol bombs at police, a Reuters witness said. Police warned the crowd to disperse immediately and deployed water cannon against them for the second successive night. Riot police were also in Larne where masked youths smashed the leisure centre's windows before starting fires in the lobby, BBC footage showed. Swimming classes were taking place when bricks were thrown through the windows and staff had to barricade themselves in before running out the back door, a local Alliance Party lawmaker, Danny Donnelly, told the BBC. "There is absolutely no excuse for what has taken place in Larne and it must be condemned," Northern Ireland's Communities Minister Gordon Lyons, a Democratic Unionist Party representative for the area, told Cool FM radio. Police said youths were setting fires at a roundabout in the town of Newtownabbey, a flashpoint for sectarian violence that sporadically flares up in the British-run region 27 years after a peace deal largely ended three decades of bloodshed. Debris was also set alight at a barricade in Coleraine, the Belfast Telegraph reported. The violence initially erupted after two 14-year-old boys were arrested and appeared in court on Monday, accused of a serious sexual assault on a teenage girl in Ballymena. The charges were read via a Romanian interpreter to the boys, whose lawyer told the court that they denied the charge, the BBC reported. Police are investigating the damaging of properties in Ballymena, which has a relatively large migrant population, as racially-motivated hate crimes. Two Filipino families told Reuters they fled their home in the town on Tuesday night after fearing for their safety when their car was set on fire outside the house. The British and Irish governments as well as local politicians have condemned the violence. (Rreporting by Conor Humphries and Amanda Ferguson; Writing by Padraic Halpin; Editing by Daniel Wallis)
Yahoo
12 hours ago
- Yahoo
Titus Welliver To Star In ‘The Westies' MGM+ Series
EXCLUSIVE: Former Bosch star Titus Welliver is back on the cop beat as a lead opposite J.K. Simmons in The Westies, MGM+'s upcoming period crime drama series from co-creator, executive producer and showrunner Chris Brancato. Co-created by Brancato and Michael Panes, The Westies is set in the early 1980s when the construction of the Jacob Javitz Convention Center on the Westies' home turf in Hell's Kitchen promises a financial windfall for the Irish-American organized crime gang. Despite being outnumbered 50-to-1 by the Five Families of the Italian mafia, The Westies' legendary brutality and cunning have given them the leverage necessary to share the spoils through a fragile détente. But internal conflict between the brash younger generation and the old-school leadership threatens to set a match to this powder keg, which will sweep the Westies into the FBI's ever-deepening investigation into the Italian mafia. More from Deadline 'Bosch' Spinoff 'Ballard' Starring Maggie Q Sets Premiere Date At Prime Video 2025 Premiere Dates For New & Returning Series On Broadcast, Cable & Streaming Stephen King Series 'The Institute' Gets Premiere Date At MGM+; First Look Welliver will play Glenn Keenan, a troubled NYPD officer who grew up with the Westies crew, torn between loyalty to the law and love for his wayward son. He likely will spar with Simmons' Eamon Sweeney, the charismatic but ruthless leader of The Westies, in a pairing of two accomplished actors each of whom has headlined their own series. Production on the eight-episode The Westies is slated to begin in July in Toronto with casting by Seth Yanklewitz, CSA and Ben Pollack. Known for his role as LAPD Detective Harry Bosch in the Amazon franchise, Welliver recently starred in the proposed Equalizer spinoff for CBS. He next will be seen in the indie film Ricky, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Welliver is repped by UTA and Leverage of Deadline Sean 'Diddy' Combs Sex-Trafficking Trial Updates: Cassie Ventura's Testimony, $10M Hotel Settlement, Drugs, Violence, & The Feds A Full Timeline Of Blake Lively & Justin Baldoni's 'It Ends With Us' Feud In Court, Online & In The Media Where To Watch All The 'John Wick' Movies: Streamers That Have All Four Films
Yahoo
16 hours ago
- Yahoo
Jim Sheridan's ‘Re-creation' Puts One of Ireland's Most Troubling Murder Cases Back on Trial
For Jim Sheridan, the defense of the falsely accused isn't just a theme — it's a calling embedded deep in his DNA. 'My mother blamed herself for killing her mother, who died in childbirth,' says the Irish director and playwright. 'So it was inherent in me. In the womb, from the fucking start, this feeling for the wrongly accused.' That unwavering obsession, one that has powered the six-time Oscar nominee's career—from In the Name of the Father (1993), starring Daniel Day-Lewis as wrongly convicted IRA suspect Gerry Conlon, to his latest project Re-creation, which had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on Sunday—traces back to what Sheridan calls his 'pre-natal sense of guilt.' More from The Hollywood Reporter Regina Hall, Ice Spice Join New 'SpongeBob' Movie ITV Studios Names Tim Carter Managing Director, Unscripted, U.K. Disney+ Names Angela Jain Content Chief for EMEA Amid Slate Growth Push 'Whenever that happens,' he says, 'when I see somebody wrongly accused, it just flips a switch, and I go nuts, you know? I can't deal with it.' With Re-creation, Sheridan and co-director David Merriman explore one of Ireland's most haunting unsolved crimes: The 1996 murder of French film producer Sophie Toscan du Plantier, who was found brutally beaten outside her holiday home in Toormore, West Cork. The film constructs a fictionalized courtroom trial that never happened for a case that remains unresolved to this day. Sheridan already explored the case in a 5-part TV documentary, A Murder at the Cottage (2021), but came away with the sense he didn't do justice to the story. With Re-creation, he blends fiction, docudrama, and emotion in a way that defies genre conventions. 'I suppose, because I wanted to put into fiction what I couldn't put into documentary reality,' he explains. 'I wanted to show the blur between the lines between documentary, reality and fiction.' The hybrid formallowed Sheridan to address what he saw as failures in both the media and legal responses to du Plantier's murder—particularly the treatment of Ian Bailey, an English journalist and the primary suspect, who was arrested but never charged in Ireland, convicted in absentia in France, and who died still professing his innocence in 2024. Bailey's story came to global attention with the 2021 Netflix series Sophie: A Murder in West Cork, which Sheridan believes deeply misrepresented the truth. The My Left Foot and In America director has harsh words for the whole genre of true crime, which he sees as often driven by sensationalism and vendetta. 'The entire bloody True Crime genre is now based around In Cold Blood, Truman Capote. It's based around this relentless revenge agenda, and it's very uncomfortable to me,' he says. 'The actual greatest writer on true crime… is Thomas De Quincey (Confessions of an English Opium Eater). He was in the genre of the wrongly accused. That's a more empathetic position than this kind of avenging God bullshit.' Shot on a shoestring budget over three weeks — 'we wrote it in three weeks and filmed it three weeks later,' Sheridan says — the bulk of Re-creation unfolds in a single jury room, in homage to 12 Angry Men. The directors borrowed the claustrophobic intensity of Sidney Lumet's 1957 classic and fused it with the ambiguity of Justine Triet's Anatomy of a Fall to reflect skepticism toward both the judicial process and the media machine surrounding it. In an exclusive clip from the film (below), the jury tries to retrace Sophie's steps, and imagine her state of mind, on the night she was murdered. Sheridan himself plays the jury foreman. Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread) appears as the quietly forceful juror number 8, who becomes a symbolic voice for Sophie in the film. The ensemble also includes The Commitments star Colm Meaney in a silent role as Ian Bailey, Game of Thrones actor Aidan Gillen as a defense lawyer, and Irish actor and filmmaker John Connors (The Black Guelph) as one of the jurors. Though exteriors were filmed on location in West Cork, most interiors were shot on soundstages in Dublin and in Luxembourg. The script, while foundational, was heavily improvised. 'We only had an outline,' says Sheridan. 'It was an attempt to cross the line between fiction and fact and to show that those lines have been irretrievably blurred.' Thanks to Sheridan's dogged efforts, the murder investigation into the du Plantier case is currently the subject of a cold case review by the Garda Serious Crime Team, the Irish investigative police. Sheridan and Merriman hope their film rekindles public interest and spurs legal action. 'We're hopeful that, at least in Ireland, that this film could start a conversation which will drive people to, you know, do the right thing,' Merriman says. 'To search for justice and find out who actually killed Sophie Toscan du Plantier, rather than just saying, 'Oh, Ian Bailey did it,' and that's good for us, because he's English, so he's a villain.' Best of The Hollywood Reporter 13 of Tom Cruise's Most Jaw-Dropping Stunts Hollywood Stars Who Are One Award Away From an EGOT 'The Goonies' Cast, Then and Now
