Jurors in the Phil Spector murder trial retired from the third consecutive day of deliberation Wednesday, without having reached a verdict.

The twelve persons who are to decide music producer Phil Spector’s fate left court Wednesday without having reached a verdict. Two weeks ago, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Larry Paul Fidler ruled that the jury would only have two options to choose from.

Judge Fidler ruled that the jurors only be allowed to take into consideration two possibilities: either Spector placed the gun in Lana Clarkson’s mouth and fired, or the actress placed the gun herself and fired it.

If the jury decides second-degree murder, Spector could spend 15 years to life behind bars. If they decide acquittal, Spector walks away free.

It was more than four and a half years ago that actress Lana Clarkson was found dead in Spector’s Los Angeles mansion. He was arrested on suspicion of having shot the actress and freed on $1 million bail. He has maintained through the years that he is innocent and a long-delayed trial commenced this year in April.

Under Fidler’s order, the twelve jurors will not be allowed to consider any lesser charges against Spector, such as voluntary or involuntary manslaughter. “I have been thinking for weeks now of alternatives,” Fidler told attorneys during a hearing to finalize legal instructions for the jury in late August. “I don't see it.”

Wednesday, the judge called the nine men and three women into the courtroom to warn them to refrain from watching a Dateline NBC special on the trial scheduled to air that night.

“Although you are under admonition not to watch TV or read newspapers, I have to be very specific,” he said. “Dateline NBC is doing a special on this case tonight. You are not to watch the show.”

He specifically addressed one of the jurors who is a “Dateline” producer.

Spector’s defense team has presented Lana Clarkson as a woman despondent over her failing acting career and ridden by financial woes. Their perspective has been that Clarkson accidentally shot herself.

The prosecution has portrayed Spector, 67, as a man with a certain pattern of drinking and then becoming violent towards women that reject him sexually. Several women have testified, describing similar episodes of being threatened by the producer.

Spector met Clarkson at the House of Blues on the Sunset Strip, where she worked as a hostess. He invited her to his home. In the early hours of Feb. 3, 2003, she was found shot to death, through the mouth, in his house.

Lana Clarkson is best known for starring in the 1986 cult sci-fi movie “Barbarian Queen.”

Spector is well known in the music industry and has worked with major musicians; the Beatles, the Ronettes, Ike and Tina Turner and Sonny and Cher. Spector was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989. He is famed for having created the “Wall of Sound” recording technique in the 1960s.