The phrase "a first verdict" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when referring to an initial decision or judgment made in a legal context or any situation requiring a verdict.
Example: "After hours of deliberation, the jury reached a first verdict, which would set the tone for the rest of the trial."
Alternatives: "an initial verdict" or "a preliminary verdict".
A first verdict on the deal that arranged his exit from the U.S. embassy will be rendered in a matter of hours, but the final one will not come for years.
April saw Indonesia's new anti-corruption court hand down a first verdict, when it convicted the governor of Aceh province, Abdullah Puteh, of trousering 3.6 billion rupiah ($380,000) of 12.6 billion rupiah that had been allocated to buy a helicopter.
The same jury will again hear evidence from the prosecution and defense before being charged with reaching a second verdict, this time on Miller's sentencing.
Just as important, the detailed judgments of the Treasury's voluminous analysis suggest that a third verdict in two or three years' time could be yes.In 1997, Mr Brown was able to talk about the potential benefits of joining the euro to Britain's trade position only in general terms.
A Moscow court gave a five-year sentence on Friday to one of the men charged with hijacking a cargo ship off the coast of Sweden last summer, the court said in a statement, the first verdict in a rare case of European piracy.
Over the next five and a half years, the conflict widened into a vicious legal battle over privacy and defamation, ending in a Denver federal court, where a jury recently returned the first verdict ever against the league, a unit of the B'nai Brith that has fought anti-Semitism, racism and bigotry for 87 years.
A former New York City police officer was convicted on Wednesday of faking a mental disability to get more than $200,000 in benefits from the Social Security Administration, the first verdict by a jury to arise from an indictment of numerous former officers and firefighters in January 2014.
D1 BUSINESS DAY C1-13 Merck Linble in Vioxx Trial In the first verdict of a Vioxx-related personal-injury lawsuit, a Texas jury found the drug's maker, Merck, liable and awarded $253.5 million to the widow of Robert Ernst, who died in 2001 after taking the painkiller.
Issuing the first verdict in a case that outraged the public and prompted a swift strengthening of Connecticut's witness protection laws, a jury today convicted a drug dealer of ordering the murder of an 8-year-old boy last year to prevent the child from testifying against him as the state's key witness in another murder trial.
The finding was the first verdict from a federal jury in thousands of similar cases against the company.
The acquittal by Judge Barry G. Williams, announced Monday in a packed courtroom, is the first verdict reached in the Gray case.
