A Juror’s Trials : Mark Bassett thought jury duty might be a lark. After the McMartin trial, he knew better.

Mark Bassett was actually rather pleased when he received a summons to jury duty, his first ever, back in March, 1987. Things had been “kind of hectic” at work and, he says, “I kind of looked at it as a vacation,” a couple of weeks sitting in the jury room, maybe a few days on a case.

Fellow employees at Symult Systems, a scientific computer company in Monrovia, suggested the possibility of his being chosen as a juror for the much-publicized McMartin Pre-school child molestation case, which promised to be drawn out. “Wouldn’t it be funny if I got on . . . “ Bassett said.

In July, nine weeks after he reported for jury duty, and having to his surprise survived a rigorous selection process during which many (500) were called but few were chosen, Bassett, a research scientist, found himself seated as an alternate McMartin juror.

He was the final alternate to be picked, one of six ready to replace any of the 12 jurors should it become necessary.

Little did he know that he had just become a player in what would be the longest and most expensive criminal trial in history. By the time it ended, it would have cost the taxpayers close to $15 million.

What was the cost to one juror, Mark Bassett?

For starters, he lost his job when the company for which he had worked for six years went bankrupt; unlike the other employees, Bassett was not free to look for another.

And, he says, the trial was “very draining. You’re dealing with extremely emotional issues. And there’s no one in the whole world you can talk to and say, ‘This is rough,’ and why.”

He remembers in vivid detail the “riveting” testimony of the McMartin children, the anatomically graphic exhibits, the sobs from their parents as the “not guilty” verdicts were read.

“There were a whole lot of issues I’ve had to deal with (that) the average person would not have to deal with,” he says. “This case took the jury through all the aspects of human experience.”

He says he became really aware for the first time of “the trauma child abuse has on families. If I were to become a parent someday, that would be something that would be a lot more on my mind.”

Although, on reflection, he says, “I really would rather have not been on” the jury, he views the process as a positive experience, one that gave him added self-confidence, taught him “a bit about trying to be tactful,” about the subtle art of negotiation, about learning to “think critically.”

They were a diverse lot, these jurors. They included a supermarket checker, a Pacific Bell employee, a biomedical technician, a meat packer, an engineer, a mechanic, a federal government employee and a stock clerk. Few among them, Bassett acknowledges, were people who otherwise might have touched his life. Like them, he had passed intense scrutiny by prosecution and defense attorneys and by Superior Court Judge William R. Pounders, who presided at the trial--”Were you ever molested as a child? Have you ever molested anyone? What do you read?”

What did he know about the case, they had asked Bassett. The truth, he says, is that all he knew was “that it was kind of a mess.”

Did he have close friends or relatives, they wanted to know, who worked with abused children? He acknowledges, “I did kind of make a list of people I knew in child care, which I assumed would get me off.” And, yes, there was a good friend in Memphis, a psychologist who works with abused children; at the time Bassett was making plans to attend his wedding.

That probably clinched it, he remembers thinking to himself--he wouldn’t be able to buy his way onto this jury.

Besides, he says, “I always heard that lawyers tend not to like intelligent people” on juries. And here he was, with an undergraduate degree from Princeton and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from CalTech.

Pounders had told prospective jurors that the trial was apt to last close to a year, and, Bassett says, “I saw it as a great imposition.” Nevertheless, he answered the questions honestly--”I didn’t think they’d believe I didn’t understand the concept of reasonable doubt,” for example, he says. Some other would-be jurors stated outright they didn’t want to serve; despite that, some were picked.

Bassett smiles and says, “I guess the attorneys’ attitude was that it’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it.”

He was less than overjoyed, as was his employer, who would continue to pay his salary, when told he could be off the job a year. Still, he says, the personnel people were “understanding and very supportive” of him but “kind of mad at the court system.”

The McMartin trial got under way on July 13, 1987. Two years and six months later--on Jan. 18, 1990--their job done, the jurors would leave the courtroom to resume normal lives.

During the course of one life, many things happen in 2 1/2 years. Among the 12 original jurors and six alternates, there were illnesses, personal tragedies and moments of joy.

Juror John Breese lost his wife and remarried. Juror Brenda Williams was married. There was a recess after the death of one juror’s father. One juror had back surgery, another suffered a stroke, another had a gallbladder operation.

One juror was dismissed for failing to be attentive. “He was actually asleep in the jury box,” Bassett says. “The other jurors had to keep waking him up.”

Before the trial ended, half of the original 12 jurors had been replaced by Bassett and the other alternates. At one point, the judge told the media that the situation for jurors was nearing “desperate straits.”

In April, 1989, Bassett, who two months earlier had replaced a regular juror excused because of job problems, learned that his company was bankrupt and had decided to “fold it up.” He might have to quit the jury and find a job.

If his soon-to-be-unemployed status was alarming news to him, it was equally so to Pounders, because there were no alternates left and the judge faced the possibility of a $15-million mistrial. So, he arranged for Bassett to go on the county payroll as of July 1.

When court was in session, juror Bassett was in court. When court was not in session, he was a senior computer program analyst for the county, earning $22.72 an hour.

“It really was very sporadic,” he says. Ordinarily, he would have provided computer trouble-shooting to judges, among others. But, he says, “as a juror, I couldn’t have any contact with judges.”

He hasn’t been on the county job since October, he says, though the county has continued to carry him. But as of the end of February, he will no longer be a county employee. Wednesday, as District Attorney Ira Reiner announced that he would re-try Buckey, Bassett was on his way to San Diego for a job interview.

At age 33, he wonders how much his high-tech field may have changed in the 2 1/2 years that he wasn’t on the front lines. Is it possible that he is no longer on the cutting edge?

“I don’t really know what the impact has been,” he says. “I should have been out there doing things, making contacts. In a technical field, what’s modern now in two years will not be as modern.”

For Bassett, a bachelor, a soft-spoken, somewhat reticent man who, probably not by accident, chose a career field that is technology-oriented rather than people-oriented, a man who joined Toastmasters to learn to present himself “more assertively,” being a McMartin juror was a lesson in human dynamics.

Not that all the jurors wound up fast friends. There were, of course, cliques, little groups that lunched together, little groups that chatted together in the hall during breaks. Bassett often ate in Chinatown with Luis Chang, an engineer who was to be elected jury foreman.

These were people who understood that, by chance, they were tapped to share an extraordinary experience. There were ties that bound. When juror Breese, a biomedical technician widowed during the trial, remarried in mid-November, Bassett was among the half-dozen juror-guests at the wedding. When juror John Duggan suffered a stroke, Bassett and some of the others visited him in the hospital. Duggan later dropped by the courthouse to say hello.

In their 30 months in court, the jurors shared each others’ joys and tragedies. Often, they laughed together. Sometimes, they acted silly. Some jurors developed a little ritual, Bassett recalls: On the 15th of each month, jurors’ payday, they “would ask the clerk of the court where their checks were. And he’d say ‘the check’s in the mail.’ ” They each earned $10 per diem, plus mileage one way.)

In early January, a few of them created a flap when, while passing time in the jury room, they helped a colleague come up with a catchy vanity license plate for a new car. On the blackboard, they wrote some suggestions: Jurypro. Hungjury. Hangman.

Neither the judge nor the attorneys were amused. “The judge called us in one by one and asked us, ‘Did you participate in this? What did the things written down mean to you?’ ”

On the second anniversary of their service, the jurors all chipped in and feted themselves with a cake. “Kind of an obvious message to the judge,” Bassett says.

And, of course, the inevitable happened to several jurors during the trial: Several of them received summonses to jury duty.

“In a story of children against adults, if Hollywood were doing the script, the children would win,” Bassett says.

But the McMartin case wasn’t Hollywood, where the action is quick and dramatic, the plot straightforward, every minute in the courtroom action-packed.

Bassett has to smile as he compares the reality of the McMartin trial--hours of boredom punctuated by moments of emotion--with the movies’ depictions of dramatic events. He observes that the escapades of an Indiana Jones may sell tickets but in real life you can’t tell “an unbelievable story” and expect to be believed.

And ultimately, Bassett and the other jurors--at the end, eight men and four women--found the prosecution’s story too hard to believe. There simply was no evidence, he says, that “all this bizarre stuff” charged by the prosecution actually happened.

Jurors sat through 60,000 pages of testimony, heard 124 witnesses and viewed more than 900 exhibits. At times, their heads reeled.

He turned to copious note-taking as a way of venting his feelings. “You’re not allowed to tell anyone how frustrated you are,” he says.

Observing the action from his seat, fourth from the witness stand, second row of the jurors’ box, Bassett became fascinated with the “theatrics” of the court, with the way seemingly unrelated and at times superfluous snippets of information fit together as parts of opposing attorneys’ grand plans.

But he’s still puzzled about the turtle caper. A great fuss was made over some turtle shells dug up in a vacant lot next to the Manhattan Beach preschool and entered as exhibits, presumably to bolster the prosecution contention that there were satanic animal sacrifice rituals at the school. But in the final arguments, Bassett says, “They never mentioned them.”

He believes he set the record on this jury for most steno notebooks filled, 20, on both sides. They’re packed in a cardboard box that he calls “my repository of McMartin memorabilia.”

He acknowledges, “I’m kind of a sentimental guy.”

The box also contains a bound copy of media coverage of the trial, a gift to each juror from Judge Pounders that Bassett is still reading through, and Polaroid snapshots of the bailiff and court clerk, both “pretty agreeable guys.”

Bassett’s memories include a glimpse of Pounders, during a recess, polishing the attorneys’ lectern. They also include his continual fear that during a long session he would have to excuse himself to use the bathroom. “It would have been so embarrassing if you had to raise your hand in front of all those people.”

The trial ground on.

As jurors waited for sessions to begin (often late), and during court delays, they whiled away hours in the jury room. Three were dedicated crossword puzzle buffs. The first few days someone brought in a Uno deck; everyone played. “Then,” Bassett says, “people got tired of that.” Later, he brought a chess set. And there was a cribbage tournament, but, he says, “I don’t think there was ever a winner declared.”

Outside of court, did the trial take over his life? “It really did,” he says. “There was so much stress.” On weekends and during breaks, he went into the San Gabriel Mountains to “find a stream and hike along it, just to kind of get away from it all.”

Some nights, he combatted the tension and frustration by jogging on the CalTech track, near his home, or by working out in the CalTech weight room. Sometimes he simply stayed home and indulged in “mindless recreation,” including Nintendo.

His roommates, a teacher’s aide and an engineer, understood that he could not discuss the case.

At home, of course, he had to make a point of avoiding reading about or seeing television coverage of the case. The latter presented no problem, he says, because he rarely watches anything except “sports and national news.” He judged by the number of reporters and cameras in the court on a given day how likely it was there would be newspaper coverage the next day. If the gallery was full, he says, “it was probably best to avoid reading the paper.’

As he drove home each night in his tan Ford Escort, the judge’s daily admonition to jurors rang in his head: “It is your duty not to converse among yourselves, or with anyone else,” the sign-off line that he knew by heart.

During mini-breaks in the trial, he backpacked in the Sierra. Each Christmas, he flew home to Pittsburgh to see his parents.

And, insofar as possible, he kept up his routine, which includes Bible study at Lake Avenue Congregational Church in Pasadena, two nights a month at Cal Tech/JPL Toastmasters, and one night a week as a volunteer at Harambee, a private Pasadena foundation providing tutoring and computer education to disadvantaged youngsters.

The judicial system, Bassett observes, is “not designed for trials running this long.” Often, he wondered, “Why can’t these guys hurry up and get the show on the road and let us go off and live our own lives?”

During summer, 1988, he received a call from a headhunter in Houston wanting to talk with him about a job. Pounders then was estimating “we’d certainly be done by April, 1989. He thought it would be sooner than that.”

The estimate proved to be unduly optimistic.

Finally, on Nov. 2, 1989, the McMartin jurors retired to deliberate, taking their places around an octagonal table in a 15th-floor Superior Court room about 20 by 20 feet.

After choosing Chang as foreman, they reviewed the long hours of testimony. “We started with the child who started the case, then requested all exhibits relevant to him and made a list of the testimony and discussed what was relevant.”

Starting typically at 9:30 each morning and continuing until about 4 in the afternoon, when, Bassett says, “you could tell people were just kind of wearing down,” they repeated the procedure, day after day, child by child.

In the end, the jurors found the defendants, Raymond Buckey, 31, and Peggy McMartin Buckey, 63, not guilty of 52 counts of molestation; they deadlocked on 13 counts against Raymond Buckey, who will be retried on those counts.

There was no single moment of enlightenment for jurors, Bassett says; it was, rather, a long sorting out, sifting out process. “There were times,” he says, “when things got heated, when people’s tempers got short.”

But what became evident to him was that each juror felt “a certain respect for the others for having gone through all this.”

These 12 were, in short, survivors. They had managed to grasp what Bassett defines as “a certain ownership of the system. In order to stay sane, you had to convince yourself that it was somehow worthwhile.”

And he believes that it was.

Bassett has little interest in debating the verdicts. Asked if he believes Ray Buckey was innocent or guilty, he says he cannot give “yes” or “no” answers. He has, he says, “a feeling of confusion . . . so many good people locked in such implacable conflict. . . . “

He adds “Gee, it would be nice if we could hop in a time machine and zip back and go and watch and see if anything happened” to the children. But “given the limitations of the evidence we had to rely on,” he is convinced the jury did its job.

Some McMartin parents, voiced outrage about the verdicts, have been campaigning for the retrial. Bassett says he understands what they have been going through. Public opinion, clearly, has been in conflict with the jurors’ decision.

Bassett, however, says he is at peace with the verdicts.

Hearing of prosecutors’ decision to retry Buckey, Bassett said, “Here we go again, for another 2 1/2 years. . . . I have to agree with the judge that this case is really poison to everybody that’s come in contact with it.”

Jury-bashing has been rampant, Bassett says: “I think a lot of it really is unfair. I mean, people with a particular point of view can just put their side of the evidence forward and say, yes, this is the evidence and why didn’t the jury agree with us. There’s no one to put forth the other side.”

When the trial ended, “I thought I would just basically disappear and never be heard from again,” he says, adding, “I’m a private person.”

But when he arrived home the afternoon of Jan. 18, there were already six messages on his answering machine, three from the media. Geraldo has called, as has 60 Minutes and People magazine.

Bassett still is weighing the experience of being a McMartin juror, and, thus, a footnote to history.

“Right now,” he says, “I’m just trying to repair the damage and get life back to normal. I have a feeling that, five or 10 years down the road, after all the immediate damage has been repaired, it’ll probably be something I look upon as a worthwhile experience.

“There’s kind of a satisfaction in feeling that 12 of us who were chosen randomly could end up being a team, that we could deal with all that evidence and hopefully, at the end, make some rational sense out of it.”

He says of the experience, “It’ll be something to tell my grandchildren about.”

And if he were to receive another summons to jury duty?

Bassett smiles and says, “I would probably make some effort to be excused.”