I needed more time. I always felt breathless, my chest constricted with fatigue. I woke up each morning in a state of dread, knowing that before the day was through some new crisis was sure to break. To make things worse, by the time Dennis Fung got off the stand, it looked like we might be headed for a mistrial.
We were losing jurors at the rate of about two a month. The judge, of course, was worried that we wouldn’t have enough alternates to last the trial, which now looked like it would be going well into the summer. Lawyers on both sides of the room kept an anxious eye on the shifting composition of the jury.
In January we lost a middle-aged female juror whom we’d pegged as pro-prosecution. She’d stated right up front on her questionnaire that she’d had to get a restraining order against her abusive ex-boyfriend. How the defense had dropped its guard long enough to let her slip through, I don’t know.
But now they were looking to rectify their error. It turned out that the ex-boyfriend had called the court claiming that she shouldn’t be on the case because she’d had problems with black co-workers. The charges were investigated; they were bunk. What was happening is that the son of a bitch was harassing her even as she sat behind a veil of sequestration. The thing I found so sad about this is that, in managing to be get herself on this jury, the woman had found herself a temporary haven.
The defense filed a motion to have her booted. We objected, and lost.
Defense: 1. The People: 0.
The same day, January 18, Ito dismissed a black man who had formerly worked for Hertz. Critics of the prosecution have asked us how we ever let this guy onto the jury in the first place. That’s a fair question. When his employment history came out during voir dire, I wanted to boot him. Bill, however, argued persuasively that this guy was a follower who would do neither harm nor good. The juror himself assured us that he’d never had any personal contact with Simpson.
After he was seated, though, we began receiving a string of tips from other Hertz employees to the effect that not only had Juror Number 228 met Simpson, but they’d seen him shaking hands with Simpson at a celebrity affair that the juror himself had helped organize! When we reported this to Ito, we learned that the judge already had this information and had, for some inexplicable reason, been sitting on it. Why, I’m not sure. As far as I could tell, there was no nefarious motive for his foot-dragging. I think he was just disorganized. Yet he actually seemed pissed off at us for bringing it to his attention. Only the court, he admonished us, is allowed to do juror investigations! Still, the facts were undeniable. This juror had lied.
I’d noticed throughout the trial that Simpson would sometimes smirk when looking at the jury box. Now I realized the reason. He had Hertz-man as the ace up his sleeve. Not anymore. Bye-bye, Hertz guy.
Defense: 1. The People: 1.
For a couple of weeks, it seemed like the jury situation had stabilized. Then, in early February, rumors began to circulate that we might lose an elderly white female juror, Number 2017, who we felt was favorable to us.
Another juror, a stout black woman held generally to be a darling of the defense, claimed that this feeble little white woman had “pushed” her during an evening walk. Even Ito had to see that this was a put-up job. But to keep the peace he ended up excusing 2017 on the hollow pretext that she’d been treated for arthritis by the same doctor who’d treated O. J. Simpson.
Defense: 2. The People: 1.
During March, two more jurors bit the dust. The first was Michael Knox, the black man who’d worn the 49ers cap and jacket to the jury walk. Knox later wrote a book, The Private Diary of an O.J. Juror, in which he explained that the only reason he’d flown the 49ers’ colors was that his brother was a public relations flak for the team and the cap was a freebie. (That, of course, did not explain why he had deliberately flouted the judge’s order to ignore memorabilia on the walls of the defendant’s home.) The Dream Team was desperate to keep this guy. But the knockout punch came when the court discovered that Knox had failed to report that he’d been arrested for kidnapping a former girlfriend. Gone. History.
Defense: 2. The People: 2.
A little over two weeks later, Ito kicked Tracy Kennedy, the white guy who professed to be part American Indian. Kennedy was well-educated and a part-time high school teacher, a prosecution juror if ever there was one. Since October, Shapiro had seemed to be obsessed with this guy. He complained that Kennedy was often seen “staring out into space.” It turned out, however, that Kennedy had been paying a great deal of attention to the goings-on around him. The sheriff’s deputies seized a laptop computer on which Kennedy had been keeping notes on his fellow jurors. These musings seemed to be preparation for writing a book.
He’d been caught red-handed with the goods; nothing we could do.
Defense: 3. The People: 2.
For about a month, during the early part of our physical-evidence testimony, there were no more dismissals. But those of us on the prosecution side, at least, knew that this was only an appearance of calm. While Dennis Fung was still on the witness stand, Ito was investigating Juror Number 462, Jeanette Harris. The court had received an anonymous tip that she’d once sought a restraining order against her husband.
Harris was definitely someone we’d have been delighted to kick. She was part of a bloc we called the Clique of Four. That bunch included another middle-aged black woman named Sheila Woods, an impressionable young black woman named Tracy Hampton, and an ill-tempered black man named Willie Cravin-all of whom we believed to have a strong pro-defense bias.
Harris, at least, had been honest enough to lay out her feelings about the defendant during jury selection. She felt sympathy for him. During voir dire she’d been asked about the Bronco chase. “My family,” she answered, “is comprised mostly of males, so I know that females have this real desire, you know, to protect their young men.” Her “heart went out” to Simpson, she’d said. I wanted to kick her. Bill wasn’t crazy about her either, but she managed to win us over. During voir dire she had made it a point to be pleasant to me. She made good eye contact, gave intelligent answers, and seemed to indicate that she could render an impartial verdict. All in all, she was impressive enough to make it very difficult for us to overcome a Wheeler objection if the defense tried to claim we were targeting her because she was black.
Almost immediately after the jury was sequestered in the Inter-Continental, we began to get reports back from the deputies that Jeanette was a troublemaker. She didn’t like any of the white jurors, who, she felt, didn’t want to sit with the blacks. This ran contrary to the intelligence we were receiving-which was that Harris and her friends didn’t want to sit with the whites.
Anyway, after we got the tip concerning Harris’s domestic problems, Ito pulled her file from the civil courthouse. She had, indeed, filed for a restraining order against her husband on grounds of abuse. When Ito brought her in and confronted her with it, she tried to minimize, but she couldn’t deny it. The defense fought to keep her, but it was over. They’d gotten one of our jurors booted on a domestic violence issue. Harris had to go.
After she was booted from the jury, Harris gave a set of wide-ranging interviews to station KCAL in which she claimed, among other things, that she thought Denise Brown was “acting.” This made me sick at heart. It still does. I think the thing that bothers me most is how Harris’s grandstanding and her apparent callousness seemed to confirm the social theories of Don Vinson, among others, who had pronounced with smug certainty that black women don’t take domestic violence seriously.