Judge Heeds Jurors’ Pleas, Orders Retrial

Responding to highly emotional entreaties by five jurors to set aside their own verdict in a 1990 stabbing case, a Santa Monica Superior Court judge who was scheduled to sentence the defendant on Wednesday instead threw out his conviction and ordered a new trial.

Earl Chew, 32, a reggae producer and former teacher who denied guilt in the aggravated assault case, said in an interview afterward that he had lost all faith in the judicial system after the May 27 verdict, only to find it again Wednesday in the faces of the very jurors who had convicted him.

“I noticed that some of the jurors seemed upset when they read the verdict,” said Chew, who has been jailed since his arrest in January. “Now I understand why. . . . This just gives me a good feeling inside that there are people out there who were willing to look at the truth.”

The judge’s decision thrilled jurors who had set about last month to reverse their own guilty verdict, maintaining that the deliberations were tainted by racial bias, confusing judicial instructions, a botched vote and badgering in the jury room.

When Superior Court Judge David Perez announced from the bench that “justice was not done” in the Chew case, the jurors, seated in the front row, let out exclamations of joy. Afterward, they hugged each other and a sister of Chew’s, who was wiping tears from her eyes.

Some who had said they felt so “betrayed” by the system that they never wanted to serve on a jury again also expressed renewed faith in the process.

The jurors--an accountant, a UCLA development expert, a flight attendant, a corporate administrator and a telephone company technician--said they had been so haunted by the verdict that they sought each other out to argue for a new trial.

Forewoman Jeanne Keys said that one young juror convinced of Chew’s innocence was so badgered in the final moments of deliberation that Keys mistakenly assumed she had decided to change her mind and vote guilty. In the tumult, she said, no final vote was ever taken on the principal charge of assault with a deadly weapon. “The vote should have been 11-1,” she said. “This should have been a hung jury.”

The jurors made the troubled deliberation process public in a story published Wednesday in The Times.

Perez said in an interview that he didn’t intend to set a legal precedent with his highly unusual ruling, but simply to grant a new trial because there was never a unanimous vote on the count as required by law.

The youngest juror, accountant Christy Adair, 26, said she felt so “intimidated” by a handful of the jurors that she failed to speak up when jurors were polled after the verdict was read. After the polling, Adair bolted from the courtroom in tears and locked herself in the jury room. None of the attorneys or the judge questioned her behavior at the time.

“I feel so relieved that something positive finally came out of this grueling process,” Adair said. “Hopefully, this proves that if a juror feels strongly enough, she can stand up to badgering in the future.”

Despite her delight over the new trial, Adair questioned why the judge had not asked for an inquiry into the matter earlier. She said she had gone to the judge’s chambers five days after the May 27 verdict and explained to Perez that she had never cast a guilty vote. After her visit, three other jurors also wrote letters to Perez independently about problems in the case.

“I think that we should have been notified by the judge,” said W. Anthony Willoughby, Chew’s attorney. “If he felt the way he did today, he could have declared a mistrial and a new trial on June 17, once he had received this information.”

Asked why he had not taken steps to call a hearing on the matter earlier, Perez said he had noted the jurors’ concerns at the June 17 hearing but felt he had to wait until Wednesday to declare a mistrial so that he could hear from both sides in the case.

Perez said he ultimately based his ruling “on the fact that the one juror--Ms. Adair--never intended to vote guilty; therefore it was not a unanimous verdict, and I had to grant a mistrial.”

In their letters, some of the jurors said that three of their number had made what they considered racially derogatory comments during deliberations, such as referring to African-Americans as “those kind of people.” Perez said using that as a basis for a mistrial was “iffy.”

The jurors also contended that they had been deeply confused by one set of judicial instructions that suggested they had to find Chew guilty if he had simply failed to stop the stabbing, which occurred in May, 1990, outside the Music Machine in West Los Angeles. On Wednesday, Perez said the jurors had simply misinterpreted the instructions. He said he would consider giving those instructions again at the new trial, scheduled for Aug. 20.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard Stone had argued strongly during the hearing that courts have traditionally held that the “mental processes” of jurors should not be considered grounds for “piercing the sanctuary of the jury room.”

Paul Bergman, a UCLA professor of law, said it was “extremely rare” for a judge to overturn a verdict based on jurors’ protests.

“To some extent, it is discouraged in the law,” he said. “The more you let jurors come back and say they’ve changed their mind, the more you will encourage jurors to talk to jurors and make them change their minds. You open up the possibilities of tampering with the system.”

Asked if the judge should have notified attorneys immediately upon hearing from Adair, he said, “given that the guy’s in jail, the judge might have acted quicker.”

Chew, who has no record, said Wednesday that he is a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy and turned down a degree from Occidental College in protest of the college’s investments in South Africa. Willoughby had previously identified his client as being from the West Indies. Chew said he is originally from St. Louis.

On a motion by Willoughby, Perez also reduced Chew’s bail from $50,000 to $7,500--a sum Chew said he thought he could raise shortly.