NEWS ANALYSIS : Jury’s Speed May Add to Trial’s Impact

O.J. Simpson’s double murder trial has been a virtual compendium of surprises. So it probably shouldn’t surprise anyone that, when the long-suffering jurors got the opportunity, they administered a shock of their own.

By reaching a verdict after less than three hours of actual deliberation, they accomplished what would have seemed impossible at any other point in the “Trial of the Century:” They rendered the legal analysts speechless--well, momentarily speechless. Then, being lawyers, the analysts rallied and stammered out authoritative speculation on the jury’s sealed verdict. And, being lawyers, they inevitably disagreed on its content.

But they also reached a quick consensus of their own: The speed with which the Simpson jurors reached their inevitably controversial decision is likely to amplify the verdict’s impact on the criminal justice system.

“Just when you thought it couldn’t get more bizarre, it did,” said criminal defense lawyer Gerald L. Chaleff. “I certainly cannot recall a case of this duration in which a verdict was returned with such speed. We certainly can say that they did not discuss the evidence piece by piece, as so many of us expected. I cannot even fathom how they reached a decision so quickly. The only explanation is that they have rejected utterly the case put on by one of the parties.”

But which one?

“Based on that read-back, the defense should be very worried,” said former Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Robert Philibosian. “The reason is that the only thing the jury asked to hear was a recapitulation of one of the case’s most important unanswered questions: Who was the person Allan Park, an independent witness, saw go into the house?”

But another former district attorney, Ira Reiner, insisted that, “if words have any meaning, this jury did not deliberate. They had already made up their minds when they retired to the jury room to allegedly deliberate. The only question is whose message carried the day--[defense attorney] Johnnie Cochran’s or [prosecutor] Chris Darden’s. Johnnie argued for jury nullification--use your verdict to send a message that the police are corrupt, and the only way to do that is to acquit. Darden’s message was ‘You know he did it; everybody knows he did it.’ I think that they bought Johnnie’s message.”

However, Reiner also cautioned that what he called the situation’s “X factor” rendered “rational analysis impossible. The X-factor is this: The idea that a case in which over a hundred witnesses were called over nine months would be decided unanimously without any deliberation is so abnormal, something is working there beyond an assessment of the facts.”

Veteran defense attorney and former prosecutor Harland W. Braun said that “not even the wildest wacko would have predicted a verdict within one day. It’s hard to imagine it being anything but not guilty. If you were going to vote guilty, you’d have had at least some discussion of whether it was first- or second-degree murder. Clearly, there wasn’t much discussion here. It’s amazing, but it’s hard to imagine that, given the composition of this jury and the temper of the times, that they would return a guilty verdict in less than five hours.”

To defense lawyer Brian C. Lysaght, “all signs point to an acquittal. If they were convicting, they would have spent some time discussing the implications of contamination and evidence planting. However, it takes no time at all to take a straw vote and find that you all agree the prosecutors haven’t proven their case.”

But Lysaght also pointed out that he’d just received a telephone call from his law partner, former federal prosecutor Brian O’Neill, who is on a golfing holiday in the west of Ireland. Even on the fairways there, news of the verdict spread. So, O’Neill paused to call in his own prediction: “Guilty.”

Two regular commentators on the Simpson trial--UCLA law professor Peter Arenella and defense lawyer Albert De Blanc Jr.--even disagreed on how much significance to give to the jurors’ demeanor Monday.

De Blanc said flatly, “I think it will be a guilty verdict. When they don’t look at your client, and they have that real sober look, it’s a conviction jury. This is a celebrity and if they found him not guilty they would be happy to communicate that to him any way they could. I have had many murder cases where the jury came back not guilty, and they were always grinning.”

Arenella agreed that the jurors’ conduct could suggest conviction, but said “it’s dangerous to read too much into jurors’ expressions when they know they are being observed.”

Other experts shied away from predictions, preferring to focus on the implications this high-speed decision may have in such a high-profile case.

“The swiftness of this verdict will have tremendous reverberations for the criminal justice system,” said Chaleff, a former president of the Los Angeles County Bar Assn. “If he is convicted, then people will complain about the system’s bias or the judge’s rulings. If he’s acquitted, there will be criticism of the manner in which the jury was selected or its sequestration or some of the rules that excluded some of the prosecution’s evidence. Either way, there will be a fight now.”

Defense attorney Marcia Morrissey said that “a quick verdict means that one side succeeded completely and the other failed utterly to persuade this jury. Still, what is most striking is the speed with which this jury discussed months worth of testimony and thousands of exhibits. This was not a decision reached between 9:40 a.m. this morning and three this afternoon.

“What we may be seeing here is not rational deliberation, but the effects of sequestration, which have created 12 prisoners of legal war desperate to get out and go home,” Morrissey said.

Though Judge Lance A. Ito enjoined the jurors on a daily basis not to discuss the evidence or form an opinion on the case before “it is submitted to you,” the rapidity of their decision is bound to suggest to some that they ignored at least one of those instructions. If it is the latter, no one will ever know.

Moreover, said De Blanc, “All the jury is really obligated to do is read and know the jury instructions. They do not have to go over all the evidence.”

The jurors’ legal obligations notwithstanding, Reiner said he is “concerned about the lack of deliberation. If there’s a conviction, the African American community will be outraged that he was convicted without deliberation. On the other hand, if there is an acquittal without deliberation, the non-African American community will say he got away with murder. The lack of deliberation strikes at the credibility of the verdict by those who do not agree with it.”

At the very least, the jury’s decision was the latest in a series of blows the Simpson case has delivered to conventional wisdom.

“I’m shocked,” said Jeffrey Abramson, Brandeis political science professor and author of the acclaimed 1994 book, “We the Jury.” Like other legal experts, he recalled that “we expected that this was a jury that would have some animosities to work through, some racial differences to begin with. This is rather miraculous. The pundits didn’t read this jury correctly. And if it’s a guilty verdict, you can say that twice over.”

Loyola University law professor Laurie Levenson, who pronounced herself “stunned, shocked and bowled over,” offered one explanation for the analysts’ surprise. “Maybe we, the observers, got spun more than the jury did. We saw the Furhman trial, the LAPD trial, the race trial. They only saw one trial.”

To defense attorney Gigi Gordon, the quality of the trial the jurors saw is what ought to be at issue now. “I can’t think of a single trial that lasted this long and returned a verdict this quickly,” she said, “but then there’s never been a case where a jury was sequestered this long. I’ve also never seen a trial where equality of resources made the playing field this level. I think O.J. Simpson got a fair trial, whatever the result is.

“But I am horrified by the speed of this verdict because whatever the outcome, it lays this very fair process open for unfair criticism. There’s a lot of fuel here for the fires on either side.”