Murder Cases Take Toll on Jurors : Deciding on a Verdict Can Be Emotionally Devastating

When Sylvia Waimrin of Laguna Beach heard that Michael D. Garritson had been acquitted by an Orange County Superior Court judge of murdering a 13-month-old child, her heart soared.

“I felt at peace,” Waimrin said.

Garritson had been tried for the same murder a year earlier, but the jury had been unable to reach a verdict. After three days of deliberation, the judge had declared a mistrial on April 8, 1985, with the jurors deadlocked 11 to 1 in favor of convicting Garritson of second-degree murder. Waimrin was the holdout.

Faced with the strong jury reaction against Garritson, his attorney asked to have Superior Judge Robert R. Fitzgerald, who had presided over the first trial, decide the case on retrial. Fitzgerald acquitted him June 23, 1986.

“For a long time I couldn’t talk about the case,” said Waimrin, an employment and training director for the City of Garden Grove. “I had a release of emotions over what I’d gone through. But Judge Fitzgerald’s decision freed me to go ahead and grow from this experience.”

Five days a week, Monday through Friday, the Orange County Courthouse buzzes with prospective jurors running between the waiting room, the cafeteria and the courtroom. They fill the elevators with small talk about how slow their cases are going, the books they brought with them to read between sessions or whether they can beat the rush-hour traffic home.

Many Never Picked

Many of them are never picked to sit on a jury. Most who are chosen end up hearing civil lawsuits or minor criminal cases. But a handful eventually ends up listening to the evidence in a murder case. For those few, say judges and jurors alike, jury duty is an experience never forgotten and not easily left behind.

The emotional toll of a murder trial can have a profound effect on a juror. The evidence often is psychologically jarring, and the strain of a decision-making process that could relegate a person to life in prison--or even death--can be devastating.

Lori Klippenstein of Fullerton still shudders when she talks about a murder case involving motorcycle gang members. Testimony of gang violence permeated the trial.

“For a long time, when a motorcycle came up behind me on the street I would get tense and hot. I would almost freeze I’d get so scared,” the former juror said.

Roxy Otteson of Fountain Valley, who was on a jury that deadlocked, called the experience “emotionally draining.”

“You aren’t allowed to talk about the case while it’s going on, so you have to bottle it all up inside you,” she said. “You leave every day exhausted from the tension.”

“What really amazes me is the sacrifice so many people are willing to make to take the time to sit in a murder trial,” Superior Court Judge Richard J. Beacom said.

Most murder trials in Orange County last a month or longer. Beacom recently presided over a four-month murder trial.

The strain of reaching a verdict is often draining even in a murder case in which the evidence of a defendant’s guilt is overwhelming.

Mary Frances Utrata of Placentia was the foreman in such a case two months ago. There was little controversy during deliberations as the jury voted Philip Dean Fry guilty of first-degree murder in the slaying of his employer, Arthur Lee Evans.

Prosecutors could tie the murder weapon to Fry, 35, who admitted he lied about Evans’ disappearance from the Cowan Heights home they shared. Despite the lack of heated debate within the jury room, Utrata was left shaken by the experience.

“None of us will ever be the same,” she said. “It’s not that we had a difficult time deciding what our feelings were. But when you get to that jury room and you finally verbalize what you’ve had to keep inside, that makes it a real commitment.”

Crying in the Restroom

Utrata trembled when she told about one woman juror who went into the restroom to cry alone.

“I went to her and asked her if she felt she was being pressured into voting guilty. She said, ‘No. I just hate to have to make that kind of decision.’ ”

As the jurors waited for the bailiff to escort them into the courtroom after announcing they had reached a verdict, “there was dead silence,” Utrata said. “We were confident about our vote. But we all knew the consequences were grave.”

Cathy E. Bennett, a nationally recognized trial consultant based in Houston, said the effects of jury deliberation in murder cases can be especially devastating because the process makes jurors evaluate their own lives.

“These jurors are making an important judgment which they know could deprive someone of life or liberty,” Bennett said. “It makes them think about judgments and what they mean. When you’re forced to do that, it uncovers a lot of things about who you are.”

Bennett, who has a graduate degree in psychology, spends much of her time now lecturing to lawyers and judges on jury selection and has a consulting business in which she helps lawyers pick juries in specific cases.

Jury Selection Crucial

Bennett is convinced that jury selection is a crucial part of a murder trial. Too often those facing murder charges are completely innocent, she said, and their only hope is 12 jurors willing to seriously debate the case.

Jurors often get so consumed by a case they hate to let it rest even when their roles have ended.

That happened in the case of Richard J. Crowell, a 40-year-old La Habra man who was charged with first-degree murder in a love triangle.

The jurors deadlocked 7 to 5 in favor of a guilty verdict, forcing the judge to declare a mistrial because they could not reach a decision.

After the trial was over, most of the jurors met on three different evenings at one of their own homes to talk about the case. Crowell’s prosecutor, Patricia Manoukian, attended one of their sessions. Crowell’s attorney, James G. Merwin, went to another.

“They were still trying to solve the case when I left,” Merwin said. The day of their last session, Crowell pleaded no contest to manslaughter in a plea bargain, though still maintaining he was innocent.

Not long after the trial ended, two of the Crowell jurors became engaged. She had voted not guilty; he had voted guilty.

Few jurors have ever gotten involved after a trial ends as much as those in the Joeri DeBeer trial earlier this year.

Admitted Killing

DeBeer, an 18-year-old native of the Netherlands, had admitted killing his legal guardian, who had brought him to the United States four years earlier. But he claimed the man had sexually molested him so many times over a four-year period that he was finally driven to kill him.

The jurors found DeBeer guilty of voluntary manslaughter in a trial in Judge Fitzgerald’s courtroom. But many of them said later their verdict left them dissatisfied. The defendant’s sentence is not supposed to be a factor in jury deliberations on his guilt. And yet the jurors couldn’t stop wondering and worrying about DeBeer’s fate.

Some of them began visiting him at Juvenile Hall, where he awaited his sentencing date. Finally, all 12 jurors, and even one of the alternates, showed up in Fitzgerald’s courtroom to plead for probation for DeBeer.

The judge granted probation and approved an arrangement under which DeBeer would live with a family in Northern California. But without the support of those jurors, Fitzgerald said, DeBeer likely would have been sentenced to the custody of the California Youth Authority.

Violated Probation

Last month, DeBeer was arrested in Contra Costa County for visiting his former girlfriend, a violation of the terms of his probation. He was given a 90-day jail sentence, but the judge stayed the sentence and offered to suspend it entirely if DeBeer stays out of trouble.

“I see the jury as the conscience of the community,” Fitzgerald said, explaining why he let them make the difference in the DeBeer sentencing.

Most prosecutors agree that the toughest assignment for a juror is a death-penalty case.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Thomas M. Goethals vividly recalls seeing jurors crying after voting for death last year for Richard Ramirez, 26, of Santa Ana, convicted of raping and murdering a woman behind a bar.

“Here’s a guy with the most aggravated criminal background you can imagine, a guy who deserves the death penalty as much as anybody you can think of, and these jurors could not stop crying,” Goethals said. “Ordering someone’s death is just not an easy thing to do.”

Voting to free an accused man is not easy either.

Waimrin recalls seeing Garritson sitting in the courtroom the first day of his first trial in March, 1985:

“You want to tell yourself that he is innocent until proven guilty, but you just cannot block it out of your mind that he would not be sitting there on trial if he hadn’t done something .”

Not Home at Time of Death

Then she listened to his wife, Linda Garritson, testify that her husband was not even home when the child died--that she had told police her husband killed the child only because she was angry at him for being unfaithful.

Waimrin said she began to see that Garritson might be innocent. Then the medical evidence, Waimrin believed, fit perfectly with Linda Garritson’s description of what happened.

“I went into that jury room with an open mind,” Waimrin said, “and I listened to what the other jurors said--I really did. But I just could not agree. One juror said, after we had talked for a long time, ‘Well, I don’t know. I think he’s guilty, but I just don’t know.’ I told him, ‘Well if you don’t know, then how can you convict the man of murder?’ ”

For a long time afterward, Waimrin looked back on the jury deliberations as “an ugly time.” She was not uncertain about her decision. But it was unsettling that 11 others saw things so differently.

Echoed Arguments

Then, a year later, Judge Fitzgerald echoed almost every argument Waimrin had made in the jury room when he acquitted Garritson.

“He has reinforced my own confidence in my thinking ability,” she said. “If you believe in something, follow your own convictions instead of someone else’s.”

Trial consultant Bennett praised Waimrin.

“It is difficult to describe her courage,” Bennett said. “You are locked in that small jury room, just the 12 of you. And during those deliberations, those people are your only peers. She was the holdout. She was completely alone. The pressure must have been tremendous.”