CHARLOTTE N.C. (Court TV)— The jury may have spoken, but it was Rae Carruth's mother who wanted the last word.

"I have to know in my heart what was it about my son that made you feel he was guilty," Theodry Carruth said to foreman Clark Pennell during a live interview with Court TV Monday.

The interview with Mary Jane Stevenson took place shortly after Carruth was sentenced to nearly the maximum — 19 to 24 years in prison — for conspiring to kill his pregnant girlfriend, Cherica Adams.

Carruth's mother, who was expressing her thoughts on the sentencing, turned to Pennell and began firing questions at him.

"How many black people have you had in your house in the past five years?" Carruth asked Pennell, who works for a crisis assistance ministry that supplies furniture and financial assistance to the needy.

Pennell said he'd had 40 or 50 black people in his house, but Carruth demanded to know how the jury could have convicted her son, whom she maintains is innocent.

"Give me one shred of evidence beside the 911 call," Carruth told Pennell, saying that the recording of Adams' call for help was "played so much it made me sick."

Without giving Pennell time to answer, she abruptly switched gears, announcing, "Next!" and then asking the foreman about a motive.

"I will not sit here on live television and debate this," Pennell told her.

Ripping her microphone off and repeatedly announcing, "I'm out," Theodry Carruth walked off camera, right after telling Pennell that, as an upper-middle class white man, he doesn't understand the plight of a black man.

Pennell, who seemed a bit shaken after the confrontation, admitted that he was one of the jurors who felt that Carruth was not guilty of first-degree murder.

"After all the discussion that was going on in the jury room, I just could not put in my mind that this gentlemen was guilty of first-degree murder," he said.

On Thursday, the third day of deliberations, the panel sent a note to Judge Charles Lamm saying that it was deadlocked. Lamm ordered them back to deliberations, and on Friday, they rendered their verdict. Although they convicted Carruth of conspiracy, shooting into an occupied vehicle and using an instrument to destroy an unborn child, the panel of seven men and five women spared Carruth a possible death sentence by clearing him of first-degree murder.

The verdict came under fire as illogical by defense attorney David Rudolf, who charged that the decision was legally inconsistent because the jury convicted him of the underlying felonies contributing to Adams' death, but not the murder itself.

But commenting during his interview with Court TV, juror Edward Karst said that, while the jury was split on the first-degree murder charge, its decision was an appropriate compromise.

"I have to concur that it's illogical. We have convicted him of all elements which are part of the first-degree murder charge. It is not logical in my mind to do that and then walk away," he said. "But, that was the best we could do. And everybody agreed that Rae was involved."

"Everyone did agree that Rae Carruth was involved. It was not an accident. It was not a fluke of fate," Karst said.

"We discussed the first-degree murder [charge] for quite awhile, and it didn't look like we were going anywhere with that," he said. "I don't think anyone gave up their conviction that Rae was guilty in this case, we did agree that he had done all the elements."

Another juror, Benita Barnette, also admitted that the decision was difficult but that it was the best compromise.

"It was a hard decision but we worked it out," she said.

Like Parnell, Barnette said that she did not believe the prosecution proved first-degree murder beyond a reasonable doubt.

"It probably would have eaten my conscience up knowing that he got life and there just wasn't enough evidence," she said.