Superstition--It’s Defended in Courtroom : Customs: Prosecutors and defense attorneys alike admit to adhering to certain illogical rituals in hopes of gaining an advantage at trial.

Van Nuys Deputy Dist. Atty. Terese Hutchison won’t go before a jury without her Batman watch.

Fellow prosecutor Eduards R. Abele has to have three pens--one blue, one red and one black--in his shirt pocket when he argues in court.

Their colleague, Leslie M. Kenyon, once put a drop of “success oil” near the jury box during a big murder trial in hopes of influencing the verdict.

Although schooled in logic and analysis, lawyers, like many others, aren’t immune to superstition.

Baseball players on winning streaks wear dirty socks, architects design buildings without 13th floors, average Joes jump out of the way of black cats. And some attorneys use talismans or odd little routines that they hope will give them an advantage in court.

“My Batman watch is sacred to me,” said Hutchison, who hated the movie but loved the watch she was given as a present. Hutchison, who became a prosecutor only last July, wore her Batman timepiece regularly to court until it broke. Thinking nothing of it, she switched to a Spuds MacKenzie watch and went to trial.

“I got a hung jury, and I’m convinced it’s because I wasn’t wearing my Batman watch,” Hutchison said. She bought a new Batman watch but keeps the other in her purse as a “backup” so she won’t find herself in court without one, she said, only half jokingly.

New attorneys are not the only ones with superstitions.

Van Nuys Deputy Dist. Atty. Lea Purwin D’Agostino, a 12-year-veteran, prosecuted director John Landis in the deaths of three people that occurred during his shooting of the movie “Twilight Zone.” She said she “would never dream” of going to trial without carrying six blue Pentel felt-tip pens and wearing her trademark bumblebee pin.

D’Agostino had six blue Pentel pens with her when she aced an exam in the first semester of law school.

“Throughout law school I had to have them, and because I was so lucky in law school and the Bar exam, I carried them into my first jury trial,” D’Agostino said. She won that trial and now will scramble, if necessary, to gather the pens before going to court. Ballpoint pens won’t do, nor will cartridge pens or pens made by another manufacturer.

Before a jury returns its decision, D’Agostino also “says a little prayer for the appropriate guilty verdict” while fingering a small Star of David necklace given to her by her father, she said.

Superstitions have existed in every society throughout history and touch on everything from birth to death and all that lies between, including weddings, food, work and play.

There are enough attorney superstitions to warrant a small section in the Encyclopedia of American Popular Beliefs and Superstitions, now being compiled by the UCLA Center for the Study of Comparative Folklore and Mythology, said Frances Cattermole-Tally, the encyclopedia’s executive editor.

For instance, one superstition, submitted from Arkansas, posits that it is bad luck for a lawyer to get a haircut until a trial is finished.

“They’re in a profession where they’re sort of under the gun all the time,” said Cattermole-Tally. “When people are under a lot of stress--and lawyers are--they do things they might later recognize as irrational but which don’t hurt anyone. And they might help.”

Then there are superstitions concerning lawyers, including one that says that a person who dreams about a lawyer will be sued or a friend will get married soon. And it is considered bad luck to have a lawyer on a cargo ship, Cattermole-Tally said.

Many people, even highly educated ones, are superstitious at times. And the attorneys in the Van Nuys district attorney’s office are probably no more prone to idiosyncrasies than any other group.

“Lawyers are probably about as superstitious as other people in society,” said Nancy Slonim, director of media services for the Chicago-based American Bar Assn. and a lawyer. “We are, after all, people.”

Jim Barnes, 42, an Encino criminal defense attorney who often defends high-profile murder defendants, said: “If a trial’s going well, I’ll take the same route to court from my office every day. If it’s not, I’ll try changing the route.”

Van Nuys Deputy Dist. Atty. Franco A. Baratta fears that predicting a favorable trial verdict will jinx a case.

“If anybody asks me what a jury’s going to do, I say they’re going to hang or come back not guilty,” said Baratta, who as a boy in New Jersey believed that if he swore, his beloved Yankees would lose.

“Do I believe it really affects the outcome? Absolutely not,” Baratta said. Then he changed his mind. “I do and I don’t,” he said.

None of the six deputy public defenders interviewed would admit to having superstitions, and interviews with an equal number of private defense attorneys produced similar results. Some prosecutors are skeptical too.

“I have a superstition--I should never appear in front of a jury without pants on,” scoffed Deputy Dist. Atty. Ronald L. Smalstig.

Others said they gave up on superstitions in court after losing cases.

Kenyon, a prosecutor for six years, said she is superstitious and believes in the occult. In her purse she carries a so-called protective amulet that is a tiny jar of rocks and twigs from the Peruvian rain forest suspended in sweet-smelling oil.

Nervous about losing a murder trial in 1987, Kenyon went to the courtroom during a recess. As an amused bailiff and court clerk watched, Kenyon put a drop of “success oil”--scented oil that is said to bring success--in front of the jury box. Then she visualized the 12 jurors coming back with a guilty verdict.

“It was creative visualization,” not unlike that used by salesmen or sports figures to improve their performance, said Kenyon, whose colleagues sniggered about the incident.

During the same trial, she gave a nervous witness a crystal to hold while testifying, telling him it would help him relax and concentrate.

Despite these measures, the jury came back with a split decision and Kenyon said she no longer tries to influence justice through superstition or the occult despite her personal faith in such beliefs and practices.

Another deputy district attorney said she used to wear a certain suit every time she argued before a jury. “I called it ‘my hanging suit.’ I probably wore it for four or five trials but then I lost a case and decided it doesn’t work anymore.”

Some attorneys cherish even ineffective superstitions.

D’Agostino, for instance, ruefully notes that her pens, necklace and bee pin “didn’t do the job in the ‘Twilight Zone,’ ” the biggest case of her career, which she lost.

But D’Agostino emphatically refused to forgo, even once, taking her pens and pin to a court trial, even as an experiment for this story.

“Logically, I know that the six blue pens and the pin don’t make the jury come in with a verdict of guilty. That’s common sense,” said D’Agostino. “But as with all superstitions, I feel uncomfortable without them.”