Jury Impaneled for Mayor’s 2nd Conspiracy Trial

An eight-woman, four-man jury was sworn in Wednesday in the felony retrial of San Diego Mayor Roger Hedgecock after a last-minute prosecution maneuver resulted in a Navy employee replacing a former congressman on the panel.

Although both sides in the case had tentatively accepted a seven-woman, five-man jury on Tuesday, Deputy Dist. Atty. Charles Wickersham asked Wednesday to reopen the jury selection process--a request that defense attorney Oscar Goodman charged was an attempt to “change the rules . . . to correct an error” that the prosecutor had made the day before when he failed to remove former Rep. Clinton D. McKinnon from the jury.

While Wickersham’s request was unusual, Superior Court Judge William L. Todd Jr. approved it after the prosecutor cited legal precedents that supported his position. In short, Wickersham argued that because the jury had not been officially sworn in on Tuesday--a technicality stemming from doubts over whether one juror who missed Tuesday’s session because of a toothache would be able to remain on the case--he could exercise peremptory challenges that he had earlier declined to use.

The juror whose dental problems postponed the swearing in of the jury--18-year-old Jacke Clary of Carlsbad--was back in court on Wednesday, and told Todd that she felt “fine” after a dentist capped a damaged tooth.

That seemingly innocuous delay, however, led to a final change in the jury’s composition after Todd’s ruling allowed Wickersham to remove McKinnon from the jury. McKinnon was replaced by Dolores Pickering, a Navy court reporter who lives in the South Bay area.

Todd, in an action that Goodman described as “a matter of equity . . . to appease my disappointment,” awarded the defense attorney an extra peremptory challenge that could have been used to remove Pickering or any of the other 11 individuals in the jury box. When both attorneys had indicated their satisfaction with the jury on Tuesday, Goodman had used nine of his 10 allotted peremptory challenges--which can be used without specifying the reason for wanting a juror removed--and Wickersham, seven.

However, both Goodman and Wickersham chose to accept Pickering, clearing the way for the jury to be finally sworn in after nine days of screening in which nearly 100 prospective jurors were eliminated, most of them due to personal hardships or because they conceded that the extensive publicity about the case would cause them to enter the trial leaning toward either acquittal or conviction.

After the jury was impaneled, four alternate jurors--two men and two women--were selected, setting the stage for opening arguments in Hedgecock’s felony conspiracy and perjury retrial to begin Tuesday.

During a recess, Goodman said he did not believe that McKinnon’s replacement by Pickering significantly shifted the balance of the jury, but angrily denounced the 11th-hour switch and contended that “the rules were changed for the prosecution.”

“As far as I’m concerned, everybody accepted the jury as was and I think that there has to be a . . . certainty to the system,” Goodman said. “When that certainty isn’t used, I don’t think it adds to the process. In this situation, the district attorney indicated that he made a mistake and he wanted to rectify his mistake. When I make a mistake, I’m stuck with it.”

Wickersham explained that “after thinking about it overnight,” he decided to eliminate McKinnon, a Democrat who served in Congress from 1948 to 1952, from the jury because of his political background.

“In the interest of the kind of jury I want, the balance and all, I decided I wanted to challenge him,” Wickersham said. “I just decided that he’s got a lot of political background . . . and I felt it would be better not having someone like that with his background on the jury.”

The 15 felony counts facing Hedgecock charge that he conspired with former principals of the bankrupt La Jolla investment firm of J. David & Co. to funnel illegal donations to his 1983 mayoral campaign through a political consulting firm owned by Tom Shepard, a close friend of the mayor. Prosecutors also have accused Hedgecock of intentionally falsifying public disclosure statements to conceal those transactions, as well as allegedly illegal personal financial aid from former J. David executives J. David (Jerry) Dominelli and Nancy Hoover. The mayor also faces a single misdemeanor conflict-of-interest charge.

Hedgecock, who has said that he was unaware of any illegal campaign donations, concedes that there were errors and omissions on some of his public reports but characterizes those mistakes as unintentional oversights or the result of conflicting interpretations of complex election and disclosure laws.

Furthermore, Hedgecock emphasized in the first trial that, like most political candidates, he did not directly oversee the day-to-day operations of his campaign. In addition, while Hedgecock signed the public reports in question under penalty of perjury, he noted that the documents were prepared by assistants and were given only cursory attention by himself--again, a fairly standard practice in politics. Any mistakes, Hedgecock contends, were, at worst, the result of sloppiness--not criminal intent.

Although Wickersham did not expand on his reason for wanting McKinnon removed from the jury, the prosecutor may have been concerned that a fellow politician might be sympathetic to such arguments from the mayor.

McKinnon’s replacement, Pickering, said during questioning Wednesday that she has been a Navy court reporter for about four years. She and her husband, who works in manufacturing technology at Rohr Industries, have three children, two of whom live with them.

Pickering, who moved to San Diego 22 years ago from Denver, worked as a Navy transcriber and operated a South Bay secretarial service before accepting her current position.

Pickering told Goodman that she looked forward to serving as a juror on the Hedgecock case because “it’s somewhat different than what we normally try” in the military cases in which she is involved.

The two men and two women selected as alternate jurors in the case, none of whom has served on a jury before, include:

- Dana Troutman, a flight attendant for PSA who is pursuing a biological sciences degree at San Diego State University and hopes to eventually enroll in veterinary school. Troutman, who is single, said that he is in the process of becoming a member of the Peninsula Bible Fellowship, and that his hobbies include scuba diving and skiing.

Asked by Goodman whether he has ever been a victim of a crime, Troutman, who lives in University City but plans to move soon to North Park, said that he once helped apprehend an individual who broke into his automobile in Lake Tahoe.

The thief’s “car stalled about 50 feet away and all my stuff was in his car,” Troutman said.

Goodman’s response produced loud laughter: “I think that’s what Mr. Wickersham would call circumstantial evidence.”

Troutman also said he had lost money in a fraudulent investment scheme similar to that which resulted in Dominelli’s imprisonment. However, that experience would not affect his impartiality if he were to ultimately replace one of the 12 jurors, Troutman said.

- Dennis Suchecki, a computer and electronics technology instructor at Mesa College who lives in rural La Mesa with his wife and one of their four children. Suchecki began teaching part time at the college in 1960 and has been a full-time instructor since 1968.

An avid golfer, Suchecki, who has lived here for about 30 years, said that his major exposure to the nation’s legal system occurred when he and a neighbor who is an El Cajon policeman made a citizen’s arrest of a speeder. The speeder later pleaded guilty in court, Suchecki said.

Suchecki said that he has had only “peripheral” involvement in politics via contributions and petition signing for candidates.

- Marian J. Pierce, a Mt. Helix housewife whose husband is a self-employed marketing consultant who specializes in sales of automotive equipment. The couple has two sons.

Pierce lived in Del Mar from 1972 to 1978, overlapping the period in which Hedgecock was Del Mar’s city attorney. Hedgecock once wrote a legal opinion that helped Pierce and her neighbors to have one side of their street declared a no-parking zone, she said.

Being selected as an alternate juror on the Hedgecock case is not the first time that Pierce has been involved with a celebrated local news event. Last year, Pierce was part of a Neighborhood Watch group that helped expose a couple who were holding sex parties in their rented house. Pierce said that she helped record the license numbers of cars headed for the parties.

“We thought if they knew we were taking license numbers, they might hesitate,” she said. “But they didn’t.”

- Susan E. Holty, a seamstress and designer of women’s fashions who lives with her husband, an assistant engineer for the Burroughs Corp., in Rancho Bernardo.

Holty described herself as a “Navy brat” who lived in Long Beach and Massachusetts before moving to San Diego about 14 years ago.

A graduate of Poway High School and a Lutheran Bible school, Holty said that she also has attended Mesa College for about 2 1/2 years.

Three potential alternate jurors were removed during Wednesday’s hearing. One of them, Lloyd DeBaker, refused to publicly answer the basic background questions asked of all prospective jurors, calling the queries “an invasion of my family’s privacy.” After meeting privately with Todd and the attorneys, DeBaker was excused from the case.

Henry J. Beukema, a retired Navy chaplain, was excused “for cause” after telling Wickersham that he believes that Hedgecock has been “a very good mayor” and that he originally was upset that the district attorney’s office decided to retry Hedgecock after the mayor’s first trial ended in February in a mistrial with the jury deadlocked 11-1 in favor of conviction.

The other potential alternate excused, Vervant Kaprielian, an independent tour planner, was removed because of his above-average familiarity with the specifics of Hedgecock’s case. When Goodman asked Kaprielian whether he was certain that his knowledge about the case would not affect his impartiality, he answered, “I have to work on it.”