I didn’t need Vinson to tell me that black women-or at least certain black woman-would be a tough sell. As I mentioned earlier, our grand jury adviser, Terry White, had let me know that a couple of middle-aged women among the grand jurors had seemed maternally inclined toward Simpson. Terry is a black man and had been one of the prosecutors on the Rodney King trial. He is infinitely better informed on issues of race and the law than Don Vinson. The fact is, Terry thought we could bring them around. We’d both seen many juries of black women who were more than willing to convict black men.
For my part, I was perfectly confident that if O. J. Simpson had been some black sanitation worker who had killed his white wife in a fit of rage, a jury of twelve middle-aged black women would have convicted the jerk in a heartbeat. The bedrock issue here was not race-but race coupled with celebrity. It was not so much that Simpson was a black man; he was a famous black man. And a well-loved famous black man. Black jurors of either sex were going to feel reluctant to knock an African-American icon off his pedestal. And in combination with race, celebrity complicated this case in ways that none of us had ever before had to consider.
That’s why so much was riding on the jury questionnaire.
Jury selection in the Simpson case was set to begin on September 26. Ito had ordered up an unusually large pool, one thousand candidates. He clearly foresaw a long, drawn-out contest and wanted to make sure we had the bodies to cover it. The first step was elementary triage: he would call in the whole bunch and hand out a one-page screening questionnaire to determine if serving on a long case would cause them hardship.
I always hated this phase. It was during hardship questioning that a lot of the better-educated, solid-citizen types would find a way to get themselves excused from service. People with steady jobs and career commitments can’t afford to take time off, because employers won’t cover their salary for more than ten days of jury service. Once they heard the estimated trial time for a long-cause case, as many as 70 percent of them would walk right out the door. These people, the ones with with steady jobs and career commitments, are usually pro-prosecution jurors. It was so ironic. The lengthy cases were by and large the most serious ones, often death-penalty cases where you want the most intelligent jurors possible. And yet if one candidate with a college degree ever made it through hardship and the gauntlet of defense challenges, we always regarded it as a miracle.
The survivors of hardship questioning-in this case a pool of three hundred-would receive the full-blown questionnaire containing questions submitted by both the prosecution and the defense. The questions themselves had to survive a rigorous weeding-out process: both sides would submit questions and, after a lot of angry rhetoric and head-banging, the judge would decide which ones made the cut.
By the time we got to drafting questions, Bill and I had already given the questionnaire a lot of thought. Our questions had to be blunt enough to hit the hot-button issues head-on: “Have you ever been beaten by a spouse?” “Have you ever been arrested by the LAPD?” “Do you fantasize about being O. J. Simpson’s date at the Rose Bowl?” That sort of thing. They had to be tactful enough to avoid offending anyone we might have hoped to win over. They had to be sly enough to trip up anyone who was lying. Usually you’ll find people who’ll lie like crazy to avoid serving. But here we had to entertain the possibility that the opposite would occur; at least some opportunists out there might be looking to cash in on their stint in the jury box at the Trial of the Century.
After we’d spent God knows how many hours clinking glasses with Don Vinson, I expected that he would at least send us a list of questions, if not a completed questionnaire, for our review. Jo-Ellan Dimitrius, after all, did the entire thing for the Simpson team. But the deadline for submitting our draft to the court was approaching, and Vinson had sent us nothing.
“What’s he waiting for,” I groused to Bill, “an engraved invitation?”
Bill promised he’d give Vinson a nudge; I assumed he did. But days passed. Nothing came by winged messenger from DecisionQuest. What Bill finally received was one question scribbled on a piece of legal paper. I don’t even recall what it was. I do recall it was not even remotely useful.
In the end, Bill and I just had to knuckle down and do the thing the way we normally did it: by ourselves. We recruited our DV experts, Scott Gordon and Lydia Bodin, to work on domestic violence. Our DNA expert, Lisa Kahn, oversaw the science part. Everyone pitched in on the celebrity issue. Question on the table: How do you get at the issue of fame? It’s one thing to prosecute a defendant who’s notorious-someone who’s well known but not particularly well liked, like Charles Keating, or the prosecutor’s dream defendant, Charles Manson. With a flaming psychopath in the dock, all you have to do is get up and recite your Social Security number to win a conviction. This was not the case with a sympathetic figure, one idolized the way O. J. Simpson was. I didn’t know of anyone who’d ever tackled a problem of this magnitude. Somehow we’d have to get the jurors past the defendant’s public image and get them to acknowledge that all they knew about O. J. Simpson was a slick facade.
We all agreed that we should seed the questionnaire throughout with celebrity questions, some direct, others indirect. First we’d ask jurors where they got their news: TV, radio, print? A juror who got most of his news from tabloids and watching evening news magazines like Hard Copy would obviously be a problem for us. Not only would he have been fed a steady diet of misinformation, but his viewing preference might show that he had a more than average interest in the cult of celebrity itself.
Some celebrity questions suggested themselves.
“Have you ever asked a celebrity for an autograph?”
“Have you ever written to a celebrity?”
Certain questions taken together provided internal checks. If, for instance, a juror wrote that he watched news on three channels daily, and yet insisted that he had no knowledge of the Simpson case, we’d have some reason to believe that he was being less than truthful.
I have to say that in this instance Lance Ito really came through for us. He gave us almost every question we asked for. Of course, he gave the defense almost everything they asked for, as well. The result was a document at least an inch thick. It was the longest questionnaire that either Bill or I had ever seen. Seventy-five pages each! I heard that when prospective jurors first saw it, they groaned. And I thought, What are you complaining about? You’re not gonna have to go through each and every one of these suckers comma by frigging comma.
One afternoon during the last week in September, a law clerk wheeled a steel cart into my office and unloaded four cardboard boxes of completed questionnaires. Three hundred of them. Bill and I just looked at each other. It was a look that said, The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. He took half. I took half. Then we burrowed into our respective offices and started to work.
The job wasn’t as simple as reading through the questionnaire once and jotting down notes. I had to flag key responses and then summarize them on a separate ten-page form that Bill and I had devised for the purpose. We’d also come up with a system for grading each juror on a scale of 1 to 5, 5 being the best. It was incredibly clumsy, but we had no precedent for a job this large.
I lost track of the time. When I finally put my pen down and looked up, it was dark outside. My God, I thought. I’d started at three o’clock in the afternoon and it was already past seven. And I’d only gotten through three of these monsters!