Hudson Jury Ignores Star Status

The jury that found 31-year-old William Balfour guilty in the murder of singer Jennifer Hudson’s mother, brother and nephew said that they weren’t swayed by Hudson’s star power. “This wasn’t about her,” Jacinta Gholston, a juror in the case, told reporters Friday after Balfour was convicted on three counts of murder in the first degree. The former gang member will face Illinois’s stiffest penalty, a mandatory life sentence. Hudson, who cried as the verdict against her mother’s killer was read, issued a statement with her sister Friday that extended their sympathy to Balfour’s family, saying “we have all suffered terrible loss in this tragedy.”