Judge Calls Meeting as Mayor’s Jury Stays Out

As the jury in San Diego Mayor Roger Hedgecock’s felony retrial completed a fifth day of deliberations without reporting a verdict on Monday, Superior Court Judge William L. Todd Jr. scheduled a meeting for today that could indicate whether the jurors are deadlocked.

While opposing lawyers in the case, City Hall officials and local politicos tried to fathom the significance of the eight-woman, four-man jury’s lengthy deliberations, Todd scheduled today’s meeting to discuss, according to a court marshal, “the jury situation” with Deputy Dist. Atty. Charles Wickersham and defense attorney Oscar Goodman.

That meeting was contingent upon the jurors’ not reaching a verdict in the felony conspiracy and perjury case by the end of Monday’s deliberations. The jury, sequestered at an undisclosed location since Wednesday, already has deliberated much longer than the jury did in Hedgecock’s first trial, which ended in February in a mistrial with the jury deadlocked 11-1 in favor of conviction. The current jurors, who have met at nights and over the weekend to ponder their decision, have deliberated about 50 hours, about twice as long as the first jury met, over four days, before Todd declared it hopelessly deadlocked.

“This jury is putting in a lot of long days,” Wickersham said. “I don’t consider it to be an abnormal amount of time, though. I think they’re just being very scrupulous and giving the evidence in the case the time it merits. Still, when jurors are out this long, everybody starts wondering what it means and guessing.”

Goodman added: “I can’t ever remember a sequestered jury putting in more hours than this one. Now, as far as what it means, who knows?”

Hedgecock, who faces likely expulsion from office if he is convicted on any of 15 felony counts, is charged with conspiring with Nancy Hoover and J. David (Jerry) Dominelli, who were principals in the now-bankrupt La Jolla investment firm of J. David & Co., to funnel allegedly illegal donations to his 1983 mayoral campaign through a political consulting firm owned by Tom Shepard, a close friend and former employee of the mayor. To conceal the purportedly illegal aid, prosecutors contend, Hedgecock falsified financial disclosure statements. Hoover, Dominelli and Shepard will be tried later on the conspiracy charges.

The mayor, however, has characterized the more than $360,000 that the two former J. David executives invested in Shepard’s firm as a routine business investment, and says that the errors on his financial reports were inadvertent ones. Hedgecock also faces a single misdemeanor conflict-of-interest charge.

Although no one except the jurors themselves can answer the oft-asked question about the length of the deliberations, attempts to read the legal tea leaves increasingly dominate discussions in local political and legal circles.

“It’s topic No. 1,” said Mel Buxbaum, Hedgecock’s press secretary.

Wickersham, who remained at home Monday because he “would have gone crazy at the office,” expressed concern that the lengthy deliberations might indicate that jurors could be heading toward a repeat of the deadlock that produced the inconclusive end to Hedgecock’s first trial.

“In a case like this, the longer they go, the less chance they can agree on anything,” Wickersham said. “I think the evidence leans heavily toward conviction, so a quick decision favors us. If the jury takes a long time, that usually means some (jurors) aren’t buying it.”

Goodman, however, said that his own personal experience “puts the lie . . . to all the rules of thumb.”

“Ordinarily, they say that quick verdicts favor the prosecution and that lengthy deliberations help the defense,” Goodman said. “But I’ve won cases where the verdicts came in fast and lost ones where the jury was out a long time. So who knows?”

The first conclusive indication of whether the jurors are, indeed, deadlocked or simply being very methodical in their review of the evidence could come at today’s meeting, both attorneys said. At the meeting, Todd could ask the attorneys whether the court should query the jury foreman about the status of the deliberations; then, if the jurors are at an impasse, Todd could further inquire whether there is any realistic hope of breaking the logjam through additional deliberations.

The only clue to the jury’s deliberations occurred over the weekend when the jurors asked Todd for a list of all exhibits introduced during the trial and for the transcript of a March, 1984, interview in which Hedgecock was questioned about his personal and campaign finances by officials of the California Fair Political Practices Commission.

Wickersham introduced the FPPC interview into evidence on the 17th and final day of testimony in the trial, and argued in his closing remarks that Hedgecock lied to the state investigators about several key points--notably, his relationship with Dominelli and about when he began discussing a possible mayoral race with Shepard.

“I take it as a good sign that they asked to see that (FPPC interview), because I think it shows that Hedgecock was deceptive and dishonest,” Wickersham said.

Goodman also interpreted the jurors’ request as “an excellent sign,” noting that Wickersham’s introduction of the interview was a major reason why he decided to rest the defense’s case without presenting a single witness.

“About 99% of that interview is favorable to the mayor,” Goodman said. Hedgecock also has said that the FPPC transcript “makes my case probably even better than I could have done by testifying.”

Hedgecock spent Monday at City Hall “conducting business as usual,” according to Buxbaum. The City Council is not in session this week, but the mayor had a full-day schedule that included a meeting of the Regional Employment Training Consortium and briefings on topics ranging from the city budget to an update on construction of the downtown convention center.

The two attorneys, meanwhile, spent most of the day staying close to a telephone, waiting for THE call.

“I’m getting pretty antsy,” Wickersham said. “I rush to the phone every time it rings, but it’s usually for my daughter.”

“I’ve been a hostage to my telephone,” Goodman added. “I’ve been getting lots of calls. But most of them are from reporters.”