Lawyers Quiz Candidates for Stewart Jury

The federal jury that will decide Martha Stewart’s fate may include a self-described fan of the domestic tastemaker, one man who thinks his stockbroker was dishonest and another who figures he wouldn’t be swayed by publicity because “the news is depressing for me, so I stick to sports.”

With potential jurors being questioned behind closed doors, the first glimpses of their attitudes came Wednesday with the release of 335 pages of transcripts from the interviews, with names edited out.

In the legal fencing between prosecutors and defense lawyers, the transcripts also reveal something about the kind of jurors the opposing sides are angling for in the fraud and obstruction-of-justice trial of Stewart and her former stockbroker, Peter Bacanovic.

The prosecution was quicker to try to disqualify professional people with financial savvy, while the defense had more qualms about those who were skeptical of Wall Street.

When one candidate, a former corporate lawyer, said she worried about leaving her two teenagers alone at home on afternoons during the trial, Robert G. Morvillo, Stewart’s lead lawyer, jokingly volunteered to baby-sit.

Bacanovic’s lawyer, Richard M. Strassberg, later challenged a prospective juror who admitted to an “instinctive dislike” for Stewart.

But lead prosecutor Karen Patton Seymour countered that the woman “did say she could put her dislike aside.”

U.S. District Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum upheld the challenge.

One middle-school principal who called herself “a fan” and said she had occasionally watched Stewart’s TV show. “I know who she is and I like what she does,” said the woman, who was accepted for possible service.

Of more than a dozen people disqualified from the panel because of probable bias, one said that sometimes powerful people “are not so trustworthy,” but another, as she was being excused, turned to Stewart and gushed, “I’m a huge fan of yours. Good luck.”

Stewart and Bacanovic are accused of lying to investigators about her December 2001 sale of $228,000 worth of ImClone Systems Inc. stock a day before an adverse government ruling sent the biotech firm’s shares plummeting.

At this stage of jury selection, the lawyers are challenging potential jurors “for cause,” such as bias against the defendants or prosecution.

At the end of the selection process, probably Friday or early next week, the lawyers will be allowed to exercise a limited number of “peremptory” challenges, for which they don’t have to give a reason.

Several hundred members of the initial jury pool answered a 35-page questionnaire this month intended to weed out people with obvious bias. The questionnaire was not made public, but references in the transcripts make clear that questions included whether stockbrokers are as honest as other people and whether Stewart was targeted because she is “a powerful woman in a man’s world.”

Those now undergoing live questioning made it through that winnowing-out phase, but some of their answers on the questionnaire are still troubling lawyers, the transcripts reveal.

For example, Seymour objected to the former corporate lawyer’s statement that she would “somewhat subscribe” to the idea that a jury sometimes should be able to ignore evidence or the law and base a decision on its own sense of fairness. Some legal experts say Stewart’s best chance for acquittal could be if a jury decided that the charges against her were unfair or excessive, regardless of the facts.

Morvillo countered that the woman simply was being candid about her struggle with the question. “My own view is that she has the type of interplay that we want to see on the jury here,” he said, according to the Tuesday transcript.

Judge Cedarbaum leaned toward accepting the woman but instructed her to try to arrange child care for her teenagers and report back with her progress Friday.

Over the protests of more than a dozen news organizations, Cedarbaum ordered the questioning closed to the press and public, fearing that the glare of publicity would make potential jurors less candid about their views.