I just got around to the comments on the Popehat post, and there’s a great one that summarizes my opinion pretty well:
[…] This was compromise verdict, among jurors who believed the cop guilty of voluntary manslaughter or murder, and slave-mentality jurors who refuse to believe that a cop is ever wrong about anything.[…]
The whole comment (it’s long) is very smart and leads to some more discussion that’s very much worth reading.