Black Juror Taken Off Panel After Others Allege Bias

In an odd twist to an already complicated legal case, a Torrance Superior Court judge on Thursday called jurors into his chambers for interviews and then dismissed one of them after others on the panel said the man was biased.

Judge John P. Shook replaced Harold Winston, 32, with an alternate juror after hearing two hours of testimony by Winston’s fellow jurors. Nine of them said the Hawthorne man appeared to begin deliberations with a bias against police officers.

After he was removed, Winston vehemently denied the accusation, saying that jurors who disagreed with his point of view during deliberations misinterpreted statements he made and then conspired to have him removed from the panel.

Winston, the only black juror on the panel, said he believes racism played a role in his removal. The defendant in the murder case, Charles Mack Moore, also is black and the case involves a raid and shooting by white Gardena police officers.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Gilbert Garcetti, who prosecuted the case with Deputy Dist. Atty. Irene Wakabayashi, argued during the trial that Moore was guilty of second-degree murder for allegedly pointing a shotgun toward Officer David Mathieson, provoking Mathieson to fire a shot that killed another man, Dexter Herbert.

Defense attorney Jeffrey Gray argued that Herbert, not Moore, was holding the gun.

Winston said he was urging jurors to find Moore not guilty because of what he said was “incredibly flimsy evidence . . . that gave me a lot of reasonable doubt about whether Mack Moore had that gun.”

He said jurors initially voted 10 to 2 in favor of conviction, but that the vote was split 6 to 6 by the time deliberations were halted Wednesday morning.

He described his reaction to being removed as “a quiet rage.”

“I feel railroaded . . . insulted and degraded,” he said. “I understand now how people feel when they go to court seeking justice and they get slapped in the face.”

Prof. Michael Wolfson, a specialist in litigation and trial practice at Loyola Law School, called the proceedings leading to Winston’s removal “rather unique.”

“That’s all pretty bizarre, because jury deliberations are this very sacred kind of secret rite protected in all sorts of ways,” Wolfson said. “Jurors are supposed to do what they do without any basic scrutiny. A jury shouldn’t be able to impeach itself.”

Winston said his problems may have arisen from a statement he made that other jurors misinterpreted.

“I said that in black areas, the police are a little less respectful of life and they can have this cowboy, shoot-em-up attitude,” Winston said. “That doesn’t mean I think that of all officers or all situations.”

But juror Stanley Kielniarz, who was one of the first jurors to level charges of bias against Winston, told Shook during a hearing that Winston started off jury deliberations a week ago by saying that he does not trust anything a police officer says.

“When we confronted him with his attitude and we said he should have divulged his prejudice about police officers (before becoming a juror on the case), he replied, ‘They never asked me that question,’ ” Kielniarz said.

In response to questions from the judge, Winston denied saying that he distrusts police officers and said he believed he could continue as a fair and impartial juror on the case.

In an interview later, Winston said he has no bias for or against police officers.

“I used to have a lot of college classes with police officers, and I got to like some of them and not like others of them, just like you would anybody,” he said.

He said Kielniarz accused him at one point of favoring a not-guilty verdict purely because the defendant is black.

“This (accusation) is racism in its ugliest form,” Winston said. “Racism has been substituted for justice here in Torrance.”

Deliberations in the case were halted Wednesday after the jury passed a note to the court saying that they could not reach a verdict.

Shook, who presided over the case but then left on vacation shortly after the jury began deliberating, asked Judge Jean Matusinka to fill in for him.

When Matusinka asked the jury whether anything could be done to help them reach a verdict, several jurors complained that one member of the panel was inflexible.

During that hearing, Kielniarz revealed that he went to the district attorney’s office during Wednesday’s lunch hour to ask what to do if a juror made statements revealing bias.

The district attorney’s investigator who responded to his query testified in a hearing that he never discussed specifics of the case with Kielniarz and that he advised him to have the jury foreman talk to the attorneys in the case.

Defense attorney Gray protested that Kielniarz revealed an inherent bias by going to the district attorney’s office with his questions rather than asking for help from the judge.

Because specifics of the case were not discussed, however, Matusinka ruled that Kielniarz had not been tainted as a juror by talking to the investigator.

On Thursday, Shook cut short his vacation and returned to court to decide whether Winston should be allowed to remain on the jury.

“It’s apparent to me that Mr. Winston has prejudged the credibility of the police officers in this case,” Shook said as he issued his ruling. “He is unable to cast aside his personal bias in weighing the evidence in the case.”

Gray blasted the judge’s decision as “the biggest miscarriage of justice that I have seen in 12 years.”

“The message to the jury is clear: If there is a majority of jurors who disagree with a minority, all you have to do is run to the judge and say, ‘This guy disagrees with us. Remove him,’ ” he said. “If a verdict comes in, it’s clear it will be a coerced verdict.”