Anatomy of a Trial: Public Loss, Lessons Learned from The People vs. O.J. Simpson

Chapter 8. Who’s to Judge?

Chapter 8 Who’s to Judge?    If media issues consumed a third of Ito’s time during the trial, jury problems took up another huge chunk. From secret note-taking for book deals to personality clashes, rebellions, illnesses,and psychological disorders,hardly a day went by from the time the jury was sequestered, on January 11, 1995, until it delivered the verdicts nearly nine months later that Ito didn’t hold a closed session to solve one knotty juror problem or another. Jury issues became so squirrelly, Ito wondered if what he called “stealth jurors” had made it onto the panel and were trying to sabotage the case. “Every day there would be three things I’d never seen before in my judicial career,” he said years after the trial. “I consulted with other judges and they hadn’t either.”1 Steve Kindred,a veteran reporter with the Los Angeles all-news radio station KFWB, offered at least a partial explanation.“With that long a sequestration ,” he observed at a 2005 panel discussion on celebrity trials, “there’s bound to be a blowback.”2 No one, least of all Ito, foresaw a nearly nine-month sequestration. Right up to the completion of jury selection, the projection was a three-to-fourmonth trial. That expectation was evident during the selection of alternate jurors to back up the panel of twelve regulars who had already been seated. “Because the trial, as you know, has been delayed in getting started because of the length of time we’ve had to spend in jury selection,” Ito said 107 in court on December 1, 1994,“it’s possible we will not start the actual presentation of evidence until sometime late in January.We may not finish until sometime in April. “I might have to sequester the jury for part or all of that time,” he added, asking a prospective alternate if that would be a problem.3 Sequestration as an option to shield jurors from media reports and casual case-related conversation arose months before opening statements began. Deputy District Attorney William Hodgman announced at an August 31, 1994, pretrial hearing that the prosecution intended to file a motion to sequester. That was an idea the defense didn’t like.4 With jury selection, which had begun in late September, continuing into mid-October and news reports becoming increasingly pervasive, debate heated up over how to shield jurors from the publicity. On October 20, Ito’s research attorney, John Byrne, reported that approximately 27,000 newspaper articles about the case had been published. That didn’t count the tens of thousands of broadcast and magazine stories or the daily segments on the likes of Good Morning America, Today, Hard Copy, Entertainment Tonight, Jay Leno, David Letterman, and countless radio talk shows.5 Nor did it include accounts of the leaked tapes of Nicole Brown Simpson’s 9-1-1 calls or the Faye Resnick interviews about her newly published book that were beginning to flood the airwaves.At that point, attorney Robert Shapiro proposed that the trial be postponed for at least a year with Simpson released on bail, a suggestion the prosecution vehemently opposed. Given the suffocating blanket of media coverage, a gag order to shield jurors from information to which they shouldn’t be privy would have been no more effective than putting a Band-Aid on a severed artery. The same would have been true with judicial admonitions. Jurors would have had to hide in a cave to avoid media coverage. Allowing courtroom-camera coverage wasn’t among the reasons Ito eventually decided to sequester. “The impetus to sequester the jury in this case was overall news media frenzy outside the courtroom in general and the computer-generated ‘photograph ’ of a beaten Nicole Brown Simpson on the cover of the National Enquirer in particular,” he wrote to a Los Angeles County supervisor. “The sequestration of the jury is not a direct consequence of the presence of the television camera in the courtroom.”6 108 Anatomy of a Trial The court’s presiding judge at the time, Gary Klausner, supported Ito’s opinion. “[T]here is no specific indication that would lead to the conclusion that the sequestration is a result of cameras in the court,”Klausner wrote in a separate letter, addressing a county task force inquiry into assessing the media covering the Simpson trial a fee to help cover...