Simpson Case Jurors Deserve Medals, Not Attorneys’ Scorn

Unbelievably, the prospective jurors are becoming the villains of the O.J. Simpson trial.

Of all the people to trash in this tragic extravaganza, jurors are the least likely targets. They’ve been conscripted into duty in and pressed into action in a run-down, dirty Downtown courthouse. They must remain there all day, herded like cattle, isolated in dank waiting rooms, treated as if they were wayward children. And all this for $5 a day and free parking a good distance from the Criminal Courts Building.

The jury panelists should be given public service medals. But instead they’ve been portrayed by prosecution and defense lawyers as greedy opportunists, eager to lie their way onto the Simpson jury to snare a lucrative interview contract with a tabloid TV show. Deputy Dist. Atty. Marcia Clark reflected this cynical and uncharitable view last week when she said at a hearing that “many if not most” of the panelists had lied in an attempt to get on the jury.

There’s a lot of hypocrisy in the attorneys’ outrage. While they’re complaining about the jurors trying to manipulate them, it’s the lawyers who are the real manipulators, as if they were political campaign managers, trying to twist and turn the electorate.

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I knew this before jury selection began. But I got a clearer and more precise view of the process from a book called “The Trial of OJ: How to Watch the Trial and Understand What’s Really Going On” by Los Angeles attorney Charles B. Rosenberg, former legal consultant to the “L.A. Law” television show.

To Rosenberg, a trial is an exercise in storytelling. “Stories have a beginning, a middle and an end,” he writes. “Stories have characters. Stories have a plot. Most of all, good stories make sense to people who hear them. Jurors are people.”

This is a very simple idea, so simple, in fact, that I ignored it in first reading Rosenberg’s book. But when I took a second look, I realized his thought explained what’s now going on in the Criminal Courts Building during the long, tedious process known as voir dire, the questioning of potential jurors.

The lawyers have campaign managers for the trial, known as jury consultants. Like the political consultants who are polluting our fall air with foul commercials, the jury consultants use polling and test groups--”focus groups”--to find jurors receptive to the prosecution or defense stories.

The consultants, Rosenberg says, pose questions for the focus groups to learn something about people’s attitudes: “What do they think about a person who buys a knife? What do they think of African American men? Are athletes people who work hard for their money or are they overpaid people who get too much attention? Do police accuse people fairly or just pick someone to blame so they can call the crime solved?”

When the data is assembled, the consultants prepare a statistical analysis, showing how attitudes vary among people of different education, income and race.

“So,” says Rosenberg, “if you see jurors in voir dire being asked seemingly innocuous questions, you can be sure that the jury consultants hired by the defense and prosecution are busy crunching the answers through their statistical models, trying to decide if the answers predict good or bad receptivity attitudes concerning the story the jurors are about to hear. If they are thought to be inappropriate, the jurors may ultimately be challenged with a peremptory challenge.”

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Having read this, I understood prosecutor Clark’s questioning of a male prospective juror Monday morning.

Clark asked a question right out of the Rosenberg book--What do you think of the Los Angeles Police Department? “I haven’t had any run-ins with them,” the man said. Then Clark asked the man what he thought of her. This seemed strange until I remembered speculation that Clark had softened her manner and attire on the advice of jury consultants who said she came across as too hard.

“You look like you’re pretty tough,” he replied. I wonder what the statistic crunchers made of that answer.

The next man in the box was even more of a challenge to the consultants.

Even without saying much, he had a couple of strikes against him. He’d had two run-ins with the police, although not in Los Angeles. His brother is a National Football League team publicity director who’d met Simpson although “he hasn’t told me anything” about the defendant.

But even without this, the lawyers might object to him.

Co-prosecutor William Hodgman probed the psyche of the man, trying to find out if he was a Simpson fan and a potential not-guilty vote.

“You refer to him as O.J.,” Hodgman said.

“I don’t think many people know him as Mr. Simpson,” replied the man, a plain-speaking African American who works two jobs and says he pays no attention to the “jaw jacking that usually goes on in this case.”

Hodgman tried another route into the man’s mind. Were you surprised, he asked, when Simpson was arrested?

“I think America was surprised,” the prospective juror replied. “Were you surprised?” he asked Hodgman.

Like a witness with something to hide, the prosecutor hesitated, then declined to answer. “It’s not a fair question,” he said.

A freethinker. A question-asker. I could be wrong, but I don’t think this is the kind of person either side wants on the jury.