THE NIGHT STALKER TRIAL : Fair Trial Possibility Questioned After Death

Legal experts and psychologists said Tuesday that the slaying of a juror in the Night Stalker murder trial poses an extreme test of the American judicial system: How much stress can a jury handle and still render a fair verdict in a capital case?

Some experts said that jurors’ anger over the slaying could spill over into their deliberations, skewing them in favor of the prosecution, even though it appears that the defendant, Richard Ramirez, had nothing to do with the juror’s death.

These experts said jurors might try to be fair to Ramirez, but take their frustrations out on him unwittingly.

“My guess is that it could tend to make them conviction-prone,” said Edith Greene, a nationally known social psychologist at the University of Colorado who studies jury behavior. “I’ve done some research on pretrial publicity that shows that even just exposing people to news stories on a series of heinous murders tends to make them more conviction-prone.”

Others, however, predicted that jurors will be able to rise above the stress and strain and separate feelings of depression and anger over the sudden loss of a colleague from their consideration of the evidence in the six-month trial.

“I’d be very surprised if there was any meaningful or significant influence on the ultimate trial verdict,” said Donald E. Vinson, a sociologist and founder of Litigation Sciences Inc., a Los Angeles-based firm that has interviewed 40,000 jurors for its own jury studies.

“If these jurors are interviewed after their ultimate verdict,” Vinson added, “I think it will be natural to say that the process of arriving at a verdict in a capital case is an extremely stressful and intense time in their lives. The death of a close associate is going to intensify that experience.”

But Vinson said he expected jurors will be able to treat the death as a “non-issue” if they were told by the judge that it was not connected to the case.

“In almost every case, jurors have great respect and admiration and deference to the judge,” he said.

Superior Court Judge Michael Tynan has wide discretion on whether to declare the case a mistrial--but precious little precedent. The only similar case may have occurred in the same courthouse earlier this year when a juror in another murder case was slain.

The juror was a man sitting in the ongoing case of a Valencia obstetrician, Dr. Milos Klvana, who is charged with second-degree murder in the deaths of infants he delivered at his home.

The juror’s death, which authorities believed was the result of a domestic dispute unrelated to the trial, came near the start of the proceedings.

Trial Continued

District attorney spokeswoman Sandi Gibbons said Superior Court Judge Judith Chirlin did not tell the other jurors that their colleague had died. She said she believes that Chirlin merely replaced the dead juror with an alternate without explaining why that juror was missing, and the trial continued.

Only one of 10 of the legal and behavioral experts interviewed by telephone across the country Tuesday said he had heard of a case in which a juror had been slain.

That expert, Robert Hanley, a Denver attorney who is former chairman of the American Bar Assn.’s litigation section, said he recalled hearing about a juror being slain at a defendant’s request, but only vaguely. He said he could not remember the name of the case.

In the Night Stalker case, Tynan elected to inform jurors of the death of their colleague in the wake of wide news coverage of the slaying.

A federal judge, who asked for anonymity because he did not want to be accused of trying to influence Tynan’s decision on whether to grant an expected defense request for a mistrial, said he thought that “it would be very difficult not to grant one.”

He said he believed that it would be hard to argue that the shooting death of the juror would not produce bad feelings toward a defendant accused of shooting others to death. But he said Tynan’s decision could ultimately rest on his evaluation of the strength of the prosecution’s case.

“If the evidence (of guilt) is overwhelming, he might be inclined not to grant a mistrial,” this judge said, on the theory that animosity toward the defendant because of the juror’s death would have only incidental impact. “But if it’s a close case, he might be more inclined to grant a mistrial.”

Other experts, including the American Bar Assn.’s Hanley, said: “If I were defense counsel in that case, I’d be scared to death that somebody was going to attribute that death to my client or to one of his friends.”

Not Sufficient Grounds

But Hanley said defense counsel’s fear is not sufficient grounds to declare a mistrial. Unless jurors were questioned and declared that they blamed the death on the defendant, Hanley said, a mistrial would not be warranted, nor would the lack of one be grounds for reversal of a conviction on appeal.

Steven Penrod, a psychologist and lawyer who studies jury behavior, said there is a “reasonable chance” that the slaying will turn jurors in the Night Stalker against the defendant, but there is almost no chance that they would acknowledge this prejudice.

Penrod, co-author of the book “Inside the Jury” and a professor of law at the University of Minnesota, said they may not even be aware of it.

He said jurors understand that their deliberations are not supposed to be influenced by events outside the courtroom and try hard to remain fair.

“I think the jurors, like virtually all the rest of us, are motivated to present ourselves . . . in a manner that will make it look like we are doing the appropriate things. Jurors will say not only to the judge, but to themselves, that they have done the appropriate thing,” Penrod predicted, making it extremely difficult for the defense to come up with hard evidence that jurors were prejudiced.