Outraged Jury Puts Anger to Work in Stabbing Case : Courts: Jurors can’t believe case even went to trial. Their stunning protest seems to succeed--for a while.

The 13 jurors chosen for the trial of Betty Burns on assault and attempted murder charges here last November were surprised and disturbed by their experiences during the selection process. They did not expect the questions to probe so deeply into their characters and pasts. They felt uncomfortable revealing themselves to strangers in a public courtroom. But they all answered every question posed.

They had their reasons.

“I wanted to be on that trial,” explained Wendi Antoun, a financial aid secretary at the University of Minnesota. “I wanted a good one. I wanted to be away from work for two weeks.”

“I prayed for a criminal case,” said Kay Noren, a housewife. “I didn’t want a civil case that would just be about wrangling over money.”

“I was glad I got called for jury duty,” said Craig Biegert, a potato farmer in suburban Osseo. “I always wanted to see what a criminal trial was like.”

When the trial began in a Hennepin County courtroom Nov. 14, the jurors had just what they’d wanted--a glimpse into a world far different from their own.

Here, before them, were the details of the near-fatal stabbing of Sheldon Gershick in a bloody Minneapolis back alley. All of those involved were of American Indian heritage and uncertain address. They had been standing in the alley, dull-eyed and drunk on beer, most of them in need of a bath and fresh clothes, when the cops arrived.

The jurors, from well-furnished houses and carefully led lives, knew little of such affairs. If they had talked at all about the courts before, it usually had been to complain about coddling of defendants, and their first look at the Betty Burns case did nothing to change their thinking. After all, the prosecutor had a statement from the victim accusing Burns, 31, of the assault--and a confession from Burns herself.

As the case began to unfold, though, something seemed wrong.

The details, and the characters before them, did not match the world the jurors thought they understood so well. By the third witness, the jurors were hearing Sheldon’s sister, Jude Gershick, talk about someone other than Burns stabbing Sheldon--a man named Beau. They were also studying the defendant. She just didn’t fit the story. To them, Burns looked innocent and unaggressive. She also seemed so neat--she’d cry and press a tissue to her eyes, then carefully fold the tissue, finely, geometrically. Serene was the word that occurred to more than one juror.

“It didn’t add up,” said Carla Rohwedder, a contractor and former junior high school science teacher. “It just didn’t make sense, because of Betty’s general nature, her demeanor. She didn’t seem to harbor that kind of angry temper at all.”

Not much else made sense to the jurors either. The hospital nurses proudly--too proudly--claimed to have understood Sheldon Gershick accuse Burns, while the pathologist insisted that the victim, with severe head wounds, couldn’t clearly communicate just then. Burns had confessed, but what she’d said lacked logic. How could a slightly built woman drive a knife though a big man’s skull, then throw the knife atop a three-story building?

Compelling Testimony

The investigating homicide detective, Sgt. Robert Nelson, did not help by sprawling in the witness chair, appearing to the jurors disdainful and arrogant, avoiding their eyes. They took offense at what he said about the Native American crowd Burns drank with--”They stink, their clothes stink, their clothes are messed up, dirty . . .”--and his assumption that Betty must have changed her clothes since the stabbing because she alone among those in the alley didn’t smell.

They objected to Nelson’s threats to Burns that he had a “white witness”--”I thought, ‘Boy, that’s sure kind of picking on her (Burns) for the wrong reason,’ ” Biegert recalled later. They were amazed at the reason Nelson gave for not interviewing other eyewitnesses whose stories did not fit the prosecution case, even after the prosecution’s investigator, Warner Bellm, had found them.

“I got other things to do,” Nelson testified. “It’s the county attorney’s problem. It’s out of my hands. She’s charged. I’ll help where I can, but you know, I’ve got other things. Its out of my hands. Once the person is charged it’s not my responsibility . . . .”

When the prosecution rested its case, some of the jurors expected the trial to be stopped right then. “I had kept thinking that the next (prosecution) witness was really going to come on with some hard evidence,” said JoAnne Sanford, an accountant. “But there never was anything really having to do with what happened at the crime. By the second day, we realized that it just wasn’t there.”

Then came the defense witnesses who had told investigators they’d seen a man named Beau--not Betty--attack Gershick. Although fearful and reluctant, Laura Briggs, Doreen Sam and Patricia Ambers all showed up to testify. Social worker Darlene Fairbank came as well, with a dated and handwritten log, to back up Doreen’s story about telephoning the police.

The eyewitnesses’ stories were full of detail. Beau didn’t just walk down the steps to the alley, he “climbed down so far then jumped down like a monkey.” When Beau called for his boots and the knife he called “baby,” the knife Alvina tossed down was “one of them big ones with ruffles on tops, whatever you call it.”

There were tears. “Someone got to stand up to Beau,” Sam sobbed, explaining why she went to the police. “I wasn’t telling a lie. I’m the one that’s got to live with it.”

There was street spunk. Cautioned by the judge after a flurry of hearsay objections, Patricia Ambers said, “If you want me to tell the truth, I’m telling the truth. I’m speaking straight up. It’s confusing. I ain’t never been on no stand before.” When prosecutor Pat Kerr, on cross-examination, asked Sam questions about her problems with drinking and raising her children, she replied, “You know what? My case does not have nothing to do with this case here . . . So I ain’t even going to answer your question about my case.”

When Sheldon Geshick, the victim, shuffled slowly to the stand, Betty Burns smiled at him. He couldn’t remember clearly, he testified, “but I don’t think Betty would do this, don’t think she did it . . . I remember getting in a fight with Beau.” As he limped from the courtroom, obviously still badly impaired, Burns wept.

Why She Confessed

The jurors by now were more aggravated than perplexed. “When the defense started,” said Arlene Olson, a housewife who’d grown up on a farm outside Minneapolis. “I thought, how did this ever come to court? I thought this was ridiculous. I thought, why don’t they just throw this out?”

The defendant, the victim and the defense witnesses obviously lived in a world quite apart from the jurors’, one full of violence, poverty, drinking and drugs. The doctors at the hospital had treated Sheldon for stab wounds more than once before. But the jurors did not find it difficult to make an imaginative leap across this boundary of circumstance and class.

“We were separating Betty’s innocence from them being innocent people, which they were not,” Kenneth Winden, an architect, said later. “And that wasn’t hard to do. And in a way that’s probably the difference between what happened to us and what didn’t happen to Sgt. Nelson. You know, he treated her as a class case, like it was just another one of those. . . . The thing about the experts who testified earlier was that in almost every case their egos were involved. And for the lawyers, it was a game, a battle. But for the witnesses, who were just part of the community that you lived in, they didn’t appear that way. I was really impressed. I really respected them.”

Looked at from their newly gained perspective, the jurors were not nearly as puzzled as the investigators and prosecutors had been over the fact that Burns had confessed. Burns, sobbing on the witness stand, had explained it clearly--she’d confessed “so (Nelson) would leave me alone” and because “I didn’t care what happened to me. . . . He was mean to me. . . . A white over an Indian, never have a chance. . . .”

The trial, the jurors felt, quite vividly had shown them what it was like to be a member of a subculture. If you don’t understand the system, they surmised, if you don’t subscribe to it, and it dominates you, you might just go with it, hoping to get by.

“I can’t imagine myself doing that (confessing) because I’ve got so much to live for and too much faith in myself and too many people who have faith in me,” said Kay Noren. “But I can put myself into her place. . . . To feel so overwhelmed.”

Midway through the defense’s case, the jurors sent a message to Judge Roland Amundson, asking that the lawyers finish up quickly so they could deliberate. There was no point in hearing more. They’d already reached a conclusion.

Jurors Speak Out

The notion of protesting publicly over what they’d seen at Burns’ trial evolved gradually in the weeks after the jury delivered its not-guilty verdict on Nov. 20.

“I think my ideals of justice and democracy and right and wrong were just turned, you know, it just rubbed me terribly the wrong way,” said Carla Rohwedder. “I was really shaken by this. That this could happen in our society, right here in Minneapolis. . . . I wanted to say ‘not guilty’ but I also wanted to say something more. I didn’t know where I wanted to begin, but I just felt a separate statement should be made.”

At a Christmas party, and through phone calls Rohwedder and Winden made to the other jurors, the group eventually fixed on the idea of a group letter. They’d never spoken out publicly before or taken a stand or leveled criticisms, so some worried about implications and liabilities. One, Kay Noren, following her husband’s advice, at first said she wouldn’t participate.

“My husband, who is a doctor, told me there were lots of kooks out there writing letters,” she recalled later. “But then I thought, they’re not kooks--I’m one of them. I got stronger in my desire to express a protest against injustice. I signed, but I didn’t tell my husband.”

In the 13-page letter drafted by Winden, the jurors indignantly denounced Nelson’s handling of the investigation, described their outrage at Burns’ treatment, and expressed alarm that the true culprit was still at large. They called for reforms both in the police department and county attorney’s office. They asked that Burns be compensated for her ordeal, and that her record be expunged.

“We ask that you please bear with us throughout this letter,” the jurors wrote, “as we report to you our findings, impressions and opinions, and vent our anger.”

Copies went to the governor, the attorney general, the state human rights commissioner, Hennepin County commissioners, Minneapolis city council members, the police chief, the police civilian review board and--to the considerable discomfort of some authorities--to local television stations and newspapers. The response was immediate.

The newspapers and TV stations scrambled for interviews. Police Chief John Laux turned the jurors’ letter over to his internal affairs department, saying that the allegations were “just too serious to let die and let people make up their own minds.” Inspector Sherman Otto, commander of the police department’s criminal investigation division, ordered a new inquiry into Geshick’s stabbing. Mayor Donald M. Fraser said, “I think the letter as written and the amount of detail that’s provided all demand a thorough investigation and that’s what will happen.” Judge Amundson said, “Many of us see things that are unjust but we rarely act upon them because we have so many other things to care about or concern ourselves about.” Although the county offered no compensation, it did expunge Burns’ record.

Watching all this, the jurors felt astonished at what they’d managed to do. Mistakes are made but it’s possible to correct them, they observed. They were able to stand up, call this out, and save Betty Burns. All the power is not with the press and the Congress and the judges, but also the people. “It’s really restored my faith,” said Rohwedder. “In speaking out, we certainly were not ignored. Just the opposite.”

The Critics’ Turn

As time went by, however, the appreciative and encouraging responses to the jurors’ letter seemed to evolve and shift in tone.

Winden’s supervisor at his architectural firm suggested his actions were a “distraction” from his work, and involved him in matters that were “none of his business.” A Hennepin County district judge, Henry McCarr, in an open letter to his colleagues, voiced objections to “unauthorized” communications from juries that “went beyond their sworn duties.” Sgt. Nelson’s wife brought tears to some jurors (but no regrets) by mailing them each a letter full of anger and anguish. If the jurors ever needed a cop, she said, she hoped a cop wouldn’t be there. Nelson himself weighed in, telling reporters “this whole thing is ludicrous. I’ll go on the (lie detector) box, she (Burns) can go on the box, and we’ll see who’s telling the truth.”

Explanations occasionally deepened into justifications. Inspector Otto, expressing regret over what he called the jurors’ “tunnel vision” in attacking Nelson, pointed out--quite accurately--that an experienced county attorney had stuck with the charges and a superior court judge had allowed the confession. Nelson, pursuing that same vein, told a Minneapolis Star Tribune reporter that “the county attorney wanted to go through with this, win or lose, because two years down the road, they didn’t want Sheldon coming back and saying they didn’t go through with it because he was an Indian.”

Hennepin County Atty. Tom Johnson, in turn, while insisting he’d never prosecute unless he had a case, allowed that “we do feel an obligation to bring justice where a Native American is the victim. It takes an extra effort, and we’ve been trying to make that effort. . . . It’s too easy to walk away in these cases. Culturally, these people don’t like to testify, to be involved. Historically, the prevalent attitude was you can’t find these people, can’t prosecute. We were trying to overcompensate for that . . . Perhaps Betty Burns confession came by her feeling afraid. Maybe their cultural differences blew right past us. . . . But to say it’s a ‘moral and ethical outrage’ is hogwash.”

Whatever the merits of these assorted comments, they appeared to diminish when police, completing their re-investigation, arrested Beau on March 10 and promptly heard him confess to stabbing Geshick. Faced with this event, the prosecutors seemed to lose some of their enthusiasm for transporting justice over cultural borders. In fact, three days after the arrest, the authorities released Beau, whose real name turned out to be Britton Well.

The case was just too muddy, the county attorney’s office explained. There were two confessions. There was conflicting testimony. Beau was claiming self-defense. Who knew what the truth was?

Under pressure from both the police and the jurors--”This makes a farce of the system, a charade,” Rohwedder told reporters--the Hennepin County attorney’s office eventually backtracked, saying it would let an outside agency decide Beau’s fate. But in their comments revealing this reversal, the prosecutors made it plain they did not think there was a case to pursue. “I guess you can imagine me trying to convince a jury that someone is guilty when I’m not sure myself,” said Paul Schneks, an assistant county attorney.

Soon after, officials also disclosed that there would be no disciplinary action taken against Nelson, and no changes in the way the police or prosecutors handled their cases. Nelson was resigning from the force, as it happened--but only to go to work as an investigator for the county attorney.

“I am comfortable with what Sgt. Nelson did,” said Inspector Otto. “I saw nothing in the (internal affairs) investigation to remove him from homicide. I’m sad to see him leave.”

“I think the judgments made were good calls, totally acceptable,” said Johnson, the county attorney. “We make a lot of mistakes, but I don’t think this was one. If Pat Kerr didn’t prosecute, I would have been disappointed.”

These comments and events troubled the jurors almost as much as had Burns’ prosecution. “The county attorney and police cannot admit to mistakes because that means they’re liable in lawsuits,” said Winden. “I think that would have some strong effect on your character and how you deal with honesty and truth.”

There was, however, another way of looking at the aftermath to the Burns’ prosecution. In the end, it became clear that many of those more familiar with the system than the jurors simply did not think Burns’ prosecution was all that extraordinary, or alarming. The process had functioned just as it should, they explained. Facts were gathered, organized and presented to the jurors, whose job it was to decide. That’s exactly how the system was supposed to work. Maybe it wasn’t pretty, but it worked. The jury failed to understand the “complexities” of the criminal justice system.

Prosector Johnson said as much, and Inspector Otto, and even the county attorney’s investigator, Warner Bellm. So did the trial judge.

“I’d like to say I had all these lofty thoughts,” Amundson said. “But to be honest, this was just another trial. I did not have great insight into this case. I was just trying to keep a level playing field. The system worked. It’s not fair to say we should have known. That’s why we have a trial. That’s why we have a jury.”