CHICAGO • The jury is scheduled to resume deliberations today in the wide-ranging corruption trial of the ousted governor, self-proclaimed political martyr and sometime Elvis impersonator Rod Blagojevich. But across Chicago, there is some evidence that the court of public opinion has already rendered its verdict.

And in a stunner of a turnaround for a man who was pushed out of office with an approval rating bobbing in the low teens, the verdict is not all bad.

"The guy's got a really big mouth, but they can't prove he's a criminal," said Bill Burns, 44, a real estate agent. "Maybe he wanted to be, but the fact is he never got there. I hate to see anybody go to jail."

In fact, the jurors do seem to be having a dilemma about that — almost two weeks into deliberations in a trial that many thought would be a slam-dunk for the prosecution.

At a news conference announcing Blagojevich's indictment in late 2008, Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, said: "The conduct would make Lincoln roll over in his grave."

But on Wednesday, jurors reached out to the presiding judge, James Zagel, to inform him that they were deadlocked on some charges. On Thursday, in response to a note from the judge asking for clarification, the jury indicated that the problem charges were wire fraud — quite possibly the most crucial part of the government's case, with 11 stand-alone counts and multiple allegations of it embedded in another high-stakes charge, racketeering.

The wire-fraud charges stem from hundreds of hours of secretly recorded phone calls of Blagojevich talking about what prosecutors described as schemes to use his political office for personal benefit. Parts of the calls were played for the jury.

"The government has to be worried," said Phillip Turner, a defense lawyer and former federal prosecutor in Chicago who is not connected to the case. "I think the jurors are confused by the charges, and I think the evidence was not all that compelling. No matter how much people hate this defendant for all kinds of things, the jurors are doing a conscientious job."

Blagojevich has repeatedly stated that he is not guilty of any of the 24 criminal counts against him, including the high-profile allegation that he tried to sell the Senate seat that had been held by President Barack Obama.

And for the last months, he has worked hard to gain notoriety and proclaimed his innocence using all manner of outlandish behavior, including being a contestant on "The Celebrity Apprentice" and delivering self-promoting speeches at every opportunity.

Whatever conspiring he did or did not do to try to benefit from his power to appoint Obama's Senate replacement, people have duly noted, Blagojevich did not sell the seat.

"You can talk all you want about doing something, but guilty is being guilty of actually doing something; it's the action," said Reese Wilson, 44, a technology consultant from suburban Chicago. "I have a problem with some of this."

Burns, the real estate agent, added, "If the old saying goes, 'follow the money,' and you do, the money is not in his pocket, or at least they have not been able to prove it."

Prosecutors, for their part, have said all along that talking was the crime. Among the charges are conspiracy to commit racketeering, conspiracy to commit extortion and conspiracy to commit bribery.

That Blagojevich had not successfully 'sold the seat," Christopher Niewoehner argued for the government, did not make his efforts less criminal. "You don't have to be a successful criminal to be a criminal," he said during closing statements last month.