Jurors Haunted by Guilty Verdict Want It Set Aside : Courts: They say racial prejudice and a botched vote plagued deliberations. Defense lawyer seeks a new trial.

In a virtually unprecedented action, members of a Superior Court jury are charging that their deliberations in a routine stabbing case were so marred by racial prejudice, a botched vote and confusing judicial instructions that they convicted a man who may be innocent.

Five jurors, including the forewoman, say their May 27 verdict haunted them to the point that they finally searched each other out to set the record straight. On Tuesday, they signed affidavits asking that the verdict be set aside against a West Indian immigrant named Earl Chew, who was convicted of stabbing a man outside a Santa Monica reggae club.

Forewoman Jeanne Keys, 39, a telephone company employee, said in an interview that three jurors made racial remarks that led her to believe they were biased against Chew, an aspiring black producer with no criminal record. Some jurors repeatedly “badgered” the youngest juror into appearing to cast a guilty vote simply to stop the harassment, Keys said.

She said the debate was so emotion-charged that when the juror, Christy Adair, 26, appeared to give in on one critical point, Keys wrongly assumed she was voting guilty on the charge of assault with a deadly weapon. “I never took a formal vote on that count,” she said. “The vote should have been 11-1. This should have been a hung jury.”

Unanimous verdicts are required to convict a defendant in criminal trials.

“Everyone was screaming and yelling at me,” said Adair, a Sony Pictures accountant. “I was just trying to get everybody off my back. The next thing I know, the foreperson hits the buzzer for the bailiff and I’m saying, wait a minute, this isn’t happening.”

When Superior Court Judge David Perez polled each juror in the courtroom, Adair and others said, she was hyperventilating in the jury box and nearly fainted. When the judge turned to ask her verdict, she said, three jurors turned and stared at her.

“It was as if they were saying, ‘Don’t you dare do it,’ ” she said. “So I just said yes. I was tired. It was late. I had been picked on for 2 1/2 days. . . . I just wasn’t a strong enough person, I guess. I had been beaten down. That’s why I’m standing up now, because I didn’t do it then.”

After the polling, Adair bolted from the courtroom in tears, and a second juror had to be sent after her. Despite her odd behavior, she said, none of the attorneys or the judge questioned her about her verdict at the time.

The verdict haunted jurors long afterward, however. That night, Keys sat down to write a letter to the judge, a letter she said she wasn’t bold enough to send. Two jurors, Donna Dunn, 37, a Westchester flight attendant, and Maureen Kinney, 54, assistant director of development of UCLA’s Johnson Cancer Center, said they were in tears over the verdict at different points during and after deliberations.

Adair said she visited Perez in chambers five days after the verdict in hopes of setting the record straight.

“I told him I felt so bad I couldn’t sleep at night,” she said. “He asked why I felt he was innocent. I asked him to take this into consideration when he sentenced him. That made me feel better because I got to say what I felt with no one interrupting me.”

Unbeknown to Adair, two other jurors who had voted guilty wrote a letter to the judge several days after her visit asking for a new trial. One of those two could not be reached. The other, who asked that her name not be used, said she continued to feel that Chew was guilty, but felt he deserved a new trial because Adair had never cast a guilty vote.

Independently, Dunn wrote yet another letter to Perez expressing other concerns.

“In this case, all evidence was circumstantial,” she said she wrote. “I feel if Earl was white, he would have been found not guilty. I heard over and over (during deliberations) ‘those people do things like that,” and ‘those people always carry weapons.’ Most jurors ignored the facts of the case. They reached their verdict based on the defendant’s race.” Dunn was a holdout for acquittal until the final day of deliberations.

As time went on, the jurors tracked each other down. They did not agree on the extent to which racial bias influenced the verdict. But they felt compelled to bring up the issue even while they declined to name the three jurors they said had made racial remarks.

Some of these jurors came out of the process so disillusioned that they didn’t believe they could ever serve on a jury again.

“This was my first experience as a juror and I was appalled by the entire process,” Kinney wrote in her affidavit to the court. “I felt I had been deceived by the court, the attorneys, and several of the witnesses, and that pertinent information was withheld that seriously hindered our efforts to make a fair and unbiased decision.”

Hanging over their deliberations the entire time, she and others said, was the specter of a third man that the victim had testified was involved in the May 24, 1990, scuffle outside the Music Machine in Santa Monica.

The victim, Pharaoh El Aton, who received six major stab wounds in the legs, testified that he was carrying at least one knife and that he couldn’t be sure whether Chew or the third man inflicted the most serious wounds, jurors said. Jurors said Chew testified he had stabbed El Aton once in self-defense, then fled in fear.

Jurors said they asked each other during deliberations why El Aton wasn’t charged, as was Chew, with carrying a concealed weapon when he admitted to as much in court. Why also hadn’t the third man been charged, or even called as a witness? Yet, their jury instructions appeared to order them not to take the third man into consideration.

Confounding matters, jurors said, the judge issued instructions they interpreted as mandating a guilty verdict even if they determined Chew had not stabbed anyone, but simply failed to stop someone else from doing so.

Half the jurors were convinced of Chew’s guilt, Keys said. The other half, forced to choose between their hearts and their heads, studied dozens of pages of jury instructions, asked for testimony to be reread, and ultimately felt that the only way to do a good job was to vote guilty.

“We all made a big mistake,” Dunn said. “These were all basically good people. But, there was a time where we had a man with tears in his eyes, a woman crying, and someone screaming. Are you really supposed to look that hard to find someone guilty that you wind up in tears because of it?”

Based on affidavits signed by the four jurors and a fifth who asked not to be named, Chew’s attorney, W. Anthony Willoughby, filed a motion for a new trial Tuesday.

“I don’t think this is buyer’s remorse,” Willoughby said in an interview. “That happens sometimes. But I think there were serious improprieties here. . . . (And) this judge has been informed that this verdict was rendered improperly and he has failed to take any actions regarding it.”

Perez did not return a reporter’s calls. The jurors who have not stepped forward could not be located for comment.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard Stone, prosecutor in the case, declined an interview, according to spokeswoman Sandi Gibbons of the Los Angeles district attorney’s office. But, she said, Stone assumed Perez would uphold the verdict in court today.

“This is very, very rare,” Jeffrey S. Brand, professor of law at University of San Francisco, said of the several jurors coming forward. “But courts are loathe to inquire into the mental processes of jurors. The theory is that jury deliberations are private, and that unless there is an external overt influence, the verdict is considered sacrosanct.”

The California Evidence Code specifically precludes the use of any evidence concerning “the mental process” of jury deliberations in connection with setting aside a verdict, he said. The only cases in which courts have typically re-examined verdicts involves outside influence, such as attempted bribes or threats.