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.
You cannot make these reckless generalizations about people. Experience had shown me that black female jurors are perfectly capable of convicting a black man who brutalizes his wife or girlfriend. As I’ve said before—and I’ll say it as many times as I have to—
the Simpson case was an anomaly
. What was perceived here as apathy on the part of black women jurors toward Nicole’s suffering seemed to me rather a deliberate form of denial. I truly believe that our black female jurors knew in their hearts that O. J. Simpson was no better than the average asshole who gets drunk on Friday nights and throws his woman against a wall. But I think they felt they couldn’t afford to act on that knowledge. Too few black men succeed in penetrating the ranks of upper-class white society for them to allow one to be taken out in such an ignominious way. Looking back on it, I think I’d have to say that blacks of both sexes were moved to breathtaking feats of denial in order to keep the Juice from going down.
With the departure of Jeanette Harris, the Clique of Four lost its center of gravity. Little Tracy Hampton claimed to have awakened one night to find a white female deputy standing at the foot of her bed. She went running to Ito, claiming that the deputies were “spying” on her, that they were going in and out of her room when she wasn’t there.
Now, during jury selection Hampton had come across as an okay sort. She was unusually quiet, but not someone we particularly had to worry about hanging the jury. During the early days of sequestration, however, she’d been drawn into the gravitational pull of the stronger personalities in the Clique and had gotten way off into the race thing.
Now we had to figure out what to make of her allegations. Ito talked to the deputies, who denied her charges. The defense, obviously, wanted to keep this juror, so they were all for rotating the deputies to another post. Chris, for once, agreed with the defense. He was afraid of the bad press it would generate if we cut Hampton loose and she spouted off to reporters about “spying” and “racial discrimination.”
I was scandalized. These deputies were doing a difficult job and doing it admirably. They’d done everything for these jurors. When a couple of jurors had deaths in the family, the deputies had accompanied them to the funerals and quite literally given them a shoulder to cry on. Now we were going to let their reputations be sacrificed for the sake of expediency? I felt it was just flat-out wrong to punish those deputies based upon the word of a juror who, in my opinion, wasn’t wrapped too tight.
But Ito thought he could hose Hampton down by removing the deputies. So that’s what he did.
Whenever I hear the pundits wringing their hands over the racial tensions on the jury, I defy them to explain what happened next. After little Tracy got the white deputies rotated out, most of the remaining jurors were so angry and upset that they demanded to see the judge to discuss the matter. One by one they professed affection for the deputies and sorrow at the shabby treatment they’d received. Through it all, Johnnie looked confused and worried. I could just about tell what was going through his head:
Oh, my God. They’re identifying with law enforcement
.
Only by promising the jurors that the deputies would not have black marks on their records did Ito get them to agree to return to the jury box. Thirteen of them wore black in support of the deputies. Two of the Clique of Four—Tracy Hampton and Sheila Woods—wore bright colors to express their opposition.
The irony, of course, is that Ito’s appeasement strategy didn’t work. Within days, Tracy was back in chambers whining that she was being ostracized. “I can’t take it anymore,” she pleaded. This time, Ito showed the good sense to cut her loose.
Two of the Clique had bitten the dust.
Defense: 3. The People: 4
.
In late May, the court received an anonymous letter purporting to be from a “receptionist in a literary agency.” The letter writer claimed to have knowledge that Francine Florio-Bunten—a thirty-eight-year-old white woman we considered one of ours—was circulating a proposal for a book to be entitled
Standing Alone
—
A Vote for Nicole
.
When I read that letter in Ito’s chambers, I looked straight at Johnnie. This was a setup. I had no doubt of it then, and I have no doubt now. The defense had been itching to kick Florio-Bunten.
Ito, however, felt this source was reliable, largely because the writer had confidential” knowledge that the jurors were staying at the Inter-Continental Hotel. (The issue of confidentiality was nonsense, of course, since the fact had already been published in a British newspaper and had long since made its way Stateside.)
Once again, Ito questioned jurors individually. The last of these, a young black woman who, I believe, was an alternate at the time, told us she’d seen Farron Chavarria, a young Hispanic woman who was friendly with Florio-Bunten, write something on a newspaper and pass it to Florio-Bunten. Francine reportedly read it and then threw it in the trash. Ito immediately dispatched a deputy to get the newspaper. Sure enough, there was a note saying, in effect, “They want to know if someone’s writing a book.” The words had been scribbled over, as though someone had tried to obscure what was written.
Farron was called first. She admitted writing the note—although, she said, she hadn’t meant to disobey the judge’s order. Then he called in Francine, who denied seeing the note, even after Ito showed it to her.
Lance had no choice. Florio-Bunten might have been lying about reading the note, and that alone was grounds for dismissal. What galled me was my certainty that Florio-Bunten had been set up. Our investigators scoured the city of Los Angeles trying to locate this supposed “literary agency.” They found nothing matching the one in the letter. To this day, Florio-Bunten maintains that the letter was a fraud. And I believe her.
But what really floored me was that after her dismissal, Florio-Bunten took to the airwaves proclaiming that the prosecution’s case was “too circumstantial,” that the blood drops at Bundy could have been left by Simpson at an earlier time. And this was supposed to be one of
our
jurors!
Defense: 4. The People: 4
.
The departure of Florio-Bunten made it inevitable that the other shoe would drop. Days later, Lance booted Chavarria for passing the note, then not leveling with him about it. And that left us down in the standings.
When the defense made its move to kick Chavarria, I leaped up and moved immediately to kick Number 1489.
Number 1489 was Willie Cravin, an African American and one of the two remaining members of the Clique of Four. Willie was a big dude with a mug so fierce that one of the reporters dubbed him the Easter Island Statue. He was a hanger for sure. He was also an irascible bully. From the outset he’d gone out of his way to be nasty to Florio-Bunten and Chavarria. He’d pushed Chavarria in the elevator as they were coming to court. And once, while they were all watching a movie, Florio-Bunten was swinging her leg and happened to tap the back of his seat. He turned and said, “Don’t you ever do that to me. How dare you.”
During previous in camera discussions with the jurors, we discovered that Cravin was viewed as a bully by many on the jury. He was definitely a problem.
I’d been watching and waiting, wondering when I should make my pitch. The passing of Chavarria was my cue. I suspected that I’d find Lance in a receptive frame of mind. He could keep a scorecard as well as any of us. He’d just booted two pro-prosecution jurors in succession. Now, he’d feel he’d have to give us one. I also knew that after the Tracy Hampton incident and the revolt that followed in its wake, he was keen upon promoting harmony at all costs.