After John Edwards Case, Much Returns to Normal The trial of former Senator John Edwards is over, and life has begun to creep back toward normal for many of the players. Mr. Edwards made plans to celebrate his 59th birthday with his family on Sunday. His daughter Cate, herself a lawyer who attended almost every day of the trial, is spending more time with her husband, a Washington oncologist whom she married just eight months ago. The jurors, who handed Mr. Edwards a mistrial on five of the federal campaign finance fraud and corruption charges against him and acquitted him on a sixth, have become practiced at explaining what it was like and why they thought the government did not prove he broke the law when two wealthy donors spent nearly a million dollars to hide his mistress while he was running for president. "Everybody keeps asking if I've seen that sex tape," said a juror, Sheila L. Lockwood, 53, a hospital telephone operator in Hillsboro, N.C. "I have to keep explaining that nobody saw it." Still, the case is not really over, and will not be unless the government decides not to retry Mr. Edwards. Frustrated witnesses have been advised to stay quiet, and Mr. Edwards himself has not granted any interviews. Nevertheless, Mr. Edwards's mistress, Rielle Hunter, has a memoir coming out this month titled "What Really Happened: John Edwards, Our Daughter, and Me." The case was brought by the public integrity division of the Department of Justice, created in 1976 to ferret out corruption in politics. So far, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has not directed his agency to announce whether it will pursue the case, which tarnished an office already under fire for which politicians it chooses to pursue and how its lawyers conduct themselves. On Wednesday, the conduct of federal prosecutors was examined in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing based in part on the Justice Department's prosecution of the late Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska. Until the Justice Department makes a move, Mr. Edwards cannot put his legal troubles behind him and the case is still active. Lawyers for both Mr. Edwards and the government have until June 25 to file briefs with Judge Catherine C. Eagles, who presided over the trial, wrangling over two remaining legal points. The defense is arguing that some of the crimes for which Mr. Edwards had been charged did not occur in the area covered by her judicial district. The other issue is the way the government gathered evidence related to a sex tape Ms. Hunter made depicting her and Mr. Edwards. The tape was one of the personal items Ms. Hunter left behind in a rental house. That and other homes were arranged for by Andrew Young, a former Edwards aide once so loyal to his boss that he claimed paternity and went underground to help hide Ms. Hunter. He was the flawed lead witness for the government who testified that he took some of the money in question to build a home not far from the Edwards family home in Chapel Hill. Ms. Hunter brought a civil suit to get her possessions back. She prevailed and the sex tape was ordered destroyed. But federal prosecutors then issued a subpoena for documents in the trial - including a long deposition by Mr. Edwards - which a state judge ordered sealed. Another state judge, Michael Morgan, on Friday appointed a prosecutor to consider criminal charges against Mr. Young, his wife, Cheri, and his lawyers because they turned over the documents to the federal prosecutors. A bigger legal question is whether the court had jurisdiction in the case. Fred Baron, the Texas lawyer who was Mr. Edwards's campaign finance chairman, flew a pregnant Ms. Hunter and the Young family on private jets from North Carolina to Florida and then on to points west to keep her from the news media. But the flights took off from Raleigh, which is in the eastern, not the middle, district of the North Carolina federal court system, and the rest of Mr. Baron's financial support, which included payment for expensive hotel bills, cash and rent for a mansion, was spent in other states. The government contends that because some of the phone calls arranging the cover-up were made in Chapel Hill, where Mr. Young and Mr. Edwards live, they qualify as evidence. If the defense prevails, the charges related to Mr. Baron's money could be dropped entirely. The legal fight shows the defense cannot really rest until it knows the case is over, said Steven Friedland, a professor of law at Elon University in Greensboro and a former prosecutor, who attended some of the trial. "Yogi Berra does have some pertinence here," said Professor Friedland, referring to the baseball legend's dictum that "it ain't over till it's over." If prosecutors decide not to pursue the case further, they will most likely simply let the clock run out on the window allotted to file new charges, he said. Other lawyers who attended the trial said that the prosecutors tried a good case, but that there is little value in retrying it when most of the jurors thought Mr. Edwards perhaps guilty of something but said in interviews afterward that the government had failed to prove their case. A new trial would also be seen as a waste of government money, at least to some of the eight men and four women on the jury who are planning a cookout reunion this summer. "It's just not worth it," Ms. Lockwood said. You're still going to have all the same facts. Still, a retrial could help Mr. Edwards as he tries to put together a life after indictment, said Kieran Shanahan, a former federal prosecutor and trial lawyer in Raleigh. "You kick a guy when he's down long enough," he said, "and eventually he becomes sympathetic." Robbie Brown contributed reporting.