The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson (60 page)

Pat Harvey, an anchorwoman at KCAL, a local television station in Los Angeles, had a dentist who had been teasing her with some tantalizing information during the first several months of the trial. He said he had a patient who was a juror in the Simpson case, but he wouldn’t tell Harvey her name. When Harris was dismissed, the dentist confided that she was the patient, and he arranged for the ex-juror to sit for an interview with Harvey. In the conversation, conducted on April 5 just hours after Harris was dismissed, Jeanette Harris sat with Harvey in the co-anchor’s chair and shared her impressions of the trial so far.

Jeanette Harris was, it turned out, the prosecution’s worst nightmare. “From day one, I didn’t see it as being a fair trial,” Harris told Harvey. Prosecutors, she asserted, were “saying a whole lot of nothing.” She accused Denise Brown of “acting” on the witness stand (just as Johnnie Cochran had predicted the black jurors would react). Harris said she believed that Mark Fuhrman was “capable of probably anything,” including planting evidence. As for the defendant himself, Harris said that she was “quite impressed” with Simpson and his ability to handle his grief: “It amazes me; it totally amazes me that he handles things as well as he does.”

Even worse than her pro-defense interpretation of the evidence was Harris’s suggestion that the racial tensions surrounding the case might influence jurors’ votes. “There is maybe a person that, say one of the Caucasians, will say, ‘I can’t vote him not guilty because when I walk out of here, I want to walk back into a life,’ ” Harris told Harvey. “Or an African-American might say, ‘I can’t say he’s guilty because I want to walk out of here.’ You know, those things cross your mind.” In other words, jurors might vote to please their racial group. In addition, there was no doubt in Harris’s mind that the sheriff’s department was promoting racial divisions on the jury. “There are racial problems, and the deputies, some of them, not to bad-mouth the sheriff’s department, but some of them are promoting it.” Worst of all, as Harris told a reporter for KCAL off camera, jurors were discussing the facts of the case among themselves—in clear violation of Judge Ito’s orders to them.

Harris’s conduct was reprehensible. She had lied about her past to get on the jury. Once seated, she viewed the evidence with a completely biased eye in favor of the defense. (How, after all, could this have been an unfair trial “from day one”?) She admitted to being influenced by outside political pressures, and then she either lied about jurors’ discussing the case or failed to bring this misconduct to Ito’s attention when the violation of his orders was occurring. In retrospect, it is hard to imagine how Harris could have done more to betray her oath as a juror.

Yet Cochran knew just how to spin Harris’s removal from the jury and her subsequent statements. The day after Harris’s interview with Harvey, Cochran held an indignant news conference on the ground floor of the courthouse. But Cochran did not direct his indignation at Harris’s misconduct. Rather, he asserted that the prosecution had undertaken “a concerted effort” to pick off jurors favorable to the defense. In a sound bite that was played repeatedly over the next few days, Cochran said, “We think that Big Brother is doing more than watching us.… We’re very concerned about this obsession to win.” Cochran had once again posed the Simpson case as a contest between the black community and the white establishment. “If Mr. Simpson can’t get a fair trial,” Cochran told the reporters gravely, “then all of us would be in trouble.”

Faced with specific, unsolicited information about a juror, the sheriffs had investigated in an unobstrusive way—by examining a court file. This inquiry had produced information establishing beyond doubt that Harris had lied on a critical issue in jury selection. She was, accordingly, dismissed as a juror. This, to Cochran, was evidence of a racist conspiracy against O.J. Simpson. That Cochran would make this absurd claim in an environment in which, according to Harris, information from the press was leaking through to jurors shows just how calculated a gesture it was. From the Todd Bridges trial to the Michael Jackson investigation—from the O.J. Simpson case to the civil suit filed by the white trucker Reginald Denny—Cochran found a handy white vendetta to denounce in every case. Dreading, as always, the ordeal endured by
Time
magazine when it ran its darkened photo of Simpson on the cover—that is, being called racist—the mainstream press mostly reported Cochran’s denunciations without comment.

Jeanette Harris also dumped a major dilemma in Ito’s lap. By asserting that jurors were discussing the case, Harris raised the troubling prospect of additional misconduct by the jury and the removal of more jurors. With only six alternates remaining (and likely months of testimony to go), this was a disheartening possibility for the judge, to say the least. But Ito felt he had to follow up, so after bringing Harris back in to flesh out her allegations, he decided to interview the remaining jurors in his chambers, one by one. For the lawyers, this was an extraordinary (and rare) opportunity to get a glimpse of the jurors and their state of mind in the middle of a trial.

Merely conducting these inquiries unsettled the prosecution, because the judge’s questions might raise the racial issue to jurors who may not have been affected by it. But as the jurors trooped through Ito’s chambers during the third week in April, it was clear that they had done plenty of thinking about race without Ito’s help.

The white jurors reacted to the racial issues with some hesitancy. Asked about racial tensions, Anise Aschenbach, a sixty-year-old white woman, said, “Well, I don’t know. Nothing has been said that I could pinpoint where that really is a problem, so
I don’t know.” And several black jurors detected no animosity from anyone. (Cochran never let up on his charm offensive, though, especially in the intimate setting of Ito’s small office. One black juror took the opportunity in chambers to ask if the judge could get the jurors a copy of the movie
Bad Boys
, a thriller starring a pair of handsome young black actors. “Good movie,” Cochran volunteered.)

The real news of these sessions was that several African-American jurors were furious, especially the men. That the black men were suffering was hardly surprising. Though it was not well known outside of Southern California, the Los Angeles sheriffs had a reputation for racism that matched that of the LAPD. Worse, the training for all deputy sheriffs involved a peculiar procedure that required new recruits, as their first assignment, to spend two years as guards at the L.A. county jail. According to a widespread belief in Los Angeles, the sheriffs then spent the rest of their careers treating civilians like inmates. Since African-American men were disproportionately represented among the residents of the county jail, it is probably understandable that the black men on the jury chafed at the deputies’ attitude at the hotel. Willie Cravin, one of the black jurors, told Ito simply that “some of the black jurors are treated like convicts.”

But Cravin was a happy camper compared to Lon Cryer, a forty-three-year-old black telephone company employee. Cryer said he had been enraged one time when a female deputy had told him to get off the patio of the hotel when she allowed several white jurors to remain. As a result, Cryer said, “I’m to the point where I don’t really trust anybody involved here. I mean, no disrespect to you, Your Honor, I don’t even trust you, sir. I mean, I don’t trust anybody.” The experience with the deputy, Cryer said, reminded him of some other things.

“Tell me about that,” Ito prompted.

“About police and—well, I—you know, I have no problems with police officers myself, but it kind of reminds me of why so many black men in America have such a problem with being confronted with white police officers in situations like when they are operating their cars, and they become very defensive about it, and it just kind of made me realize that those situations do exist, and you
don’t really have to be doing anything for them to take it upon themself to be harassing toward you.”

One can scarcely imagine a monologue more likely to alienate the prosecutors in the case. But Clark and Darden made no effort to remove Cryer, and Ito completed his examination of the jurors without finding reason to dismiss any more of them. In the end, the notion of a prosecution conspiracy to eliminate hostile jurors was absurd. If anything, the prosecution probably should have been more aggressive in ferreting out the biases of potential and sitting jurors in the case. (After all, several months later, on the day the verdict came in, it was Lon Cryer who showed his support for the defendant in the most dramatic way.)

Ito did make one change as a result of his interviews with the jurors. Responding to the complaints of Cryer and a black twenty-five-year-old flight attendant, Tracy Hampton, the judge transferred three of the deputies who had been guarding the jurors at the hotel. The jurors noticed their absence on the night of Thursday, April 20, and several of them were outraged. They had formed attachments to some of the deputies and felt that the deputies had been treated unfairly. Thirteen jurors decided to write a letter of protest to Ito—and to back it up with an even more conspicuous display.

The following morning, Friday, April 21, began with one of the more curious public spectacles in the history of American jurisprudence. Every morning, the jurors would be taken from their bus to a lounge on the eleventh floor of the courthouse. A few minutes before testimony began, they would go down a freight elevator to the ninth floor, where they would walk single file past the reporters and spectators assembled for the day. On this Friday, the thirteen protesting jurors all wore black outfits to court, as in an ersatz funeral procession. The rest of the jurors, the remnants of the Jeanette Harris clique—including Lon Cryer, Tracy Hampton, and Sheila Woods—defiantly wore bright colors in counterprotest. To a certain extent, the protest crossed racial boundaries; all of the white and Hispanic jurors, plus seven African-Americans, wore black, but all of the counterprotesters were African-Americans, including both of the remaining black men. But even this signal was muddled, because the two black men on the jury, Cravin and
Cryer, couldn’t abide one another. (The protest provided a vivid demonstration of the Stockholm syndrome, which holds that captives come to identify with their keepers: The one thing that stirred the jurors from their usual passivity was a perceived attack on the deputies who “protected” them.)

In short, the jury was in chaos, leaving the trial on the verge of collapse. Ito canceled testimony for the day, explained to the jurors that the deputies had been transferred, not fired, and generally gave everyone a weekend to cool off. It worked for a while, and the following week the judge eased tensions on the jury somewhat when he finally dismissed Tracy Hampton. She had looked almost catatonic through the entire trial, rarely directing her glance away from her feet during testimony, and she had asked several times to be excused from the case. On May 1, without objection from either side, Ito agreed. (A few months later, Hampton recovered sufficiently to pose for a
Playboy
pictorial.)

It was clear, as the DNA testimony droned on in the courtroom, which juror most troubled Cochran and the defense team: Francine Florio-Bunten, a thirty-eight-year-old white telephone-company employee, who was following the prosecution’s case with keen interest. She was probably the most educated and worldly juror, the only one who complained about not being allowed to browse in bookstores. Jeanette Harris, the defense’s biggest known partisan, despised Florio-Bunten. During the jury protest in April, Florio-Bunten wore a defiant expression and a long, flowing black gown.