From the Transcripts

Here are excerpts of court transcripts released Thursday about jurors in the Reginald O. Denny beating trial. On Juror 373, who was dismissed from the jury:

* Jury forewoman, an African-American woman in her 30s: “We have all been trying to figure out exactly what is going on in her mind, so I really don’t know what she is doing, if she is pondering or way off in the twilight zone or exactly what she is. And I am not trying to be facetious or sarcastic, I just don’t think she is all up there.

“It has gotten to the point, because they are so frustrated, that they feel it’s either her or us, you know what I mean? It’s either her or us. . . . The job is methodical enough and tedious enough without her coming up with some senseless remarks when we are all back there trying to accomplish something and we get right there, right when we think we can take a vote one way or the other and she forgets what we have just discussed, so therefore we have to start back with, you know, square one.”

* Juror 326, an Anglo woman in her 50s or 60s: “She keeps telling us--all of us--that we don’t have our notes together. . . . We can’t understand what she is talking about. Our notes--as far as I am concerned, my notes are together and everyone else feels the same way, but . . . every day she keeps going back to this business of the notes not being together and none of us can really understand. She tries to explain it to us, but we cannot understand what she is talking about.

“She just sort of segregates herself away from everybody in the evening. After dinner she just goes into her room and that’s the last we see of her until the next morning.”

* Juror 373, a black woman in her 50s or 60s: “I truly believe that they feel they understand what has to be done, how it has to be done, but I don’t believe that the understanding is there.

“I mean, this is as much as I can do, is call it to your attention. . . . I can’t stay back there and fight with them because it’s too hard on me, it really is. And I just can’t, in good conscience, see it go like this. I mean I really cannot. They’re not getting a fair trial. I am telling you right up, they’re not.

“These are lay people . . . ‘I got my mind made up,’ you know, and this sort of attitude. ‘Let’s just get on with it, OK, yeah, all right’ . . . ‘Does everybody agree on this? Does everybody? Yeah.’ And that’s it . . . And I can’t go with that, you know, I can’t. There’s more--it’s too important.”

* Judge John W. Ouderkirk: “I don’t know whether the lady is telling the truth or telling a lie as to what has happened there. She may well be telling the truth as the other jurors have evaluated the situation, and she may have some sort of mental defect, for lack of a better term, and I don’t want to embarrass the lady.

“I didn’t find her to be credible in her presentation. I don’t know whether she is not being truthful or whether she’s forgetful, I honestly don’t know, but the juror is not deliberating on the case in any true sense of the word.”

From the transcript of the hearing on Juror 104:

* Juror 307, a Latina in her 20s: “Every time we were . . . having deliberations, it will just pop out and she will start talking about how . . . it should just be a hung jury and go home. Either no verdict or a hung jury so she can go home to her boyfriend.

“We were in . . . our (hotel) room and all of a sudden she came . . . off the phone saying, ‘I can’t take it any more,’ and she went running down the hall screaming, yelling out loud. She was cussing and saying she can’t take it anymore, she just wants to go home.”

* Juror 104, an Anglo woman in her 20s or 30s: “I was told, you know, when we were gonna be sequestered, that we were gonna be allowed to have visitors . . . and then after we became sequestered, we were told that we are not allowed visitors, and I have been given 15 minutes on the phone every night with my boyfriend and I thought that was really unfair with this whole sequestering.

“I just didn’t feel I was getting enough time on the phone, or, you know, visitation with my boyfriend.”

* Ouderkirk: “The juror has stated that the things that have been bothering her have been resolved in her own mind and her boyfriend’s mind, I guess. So, I don’t see good legal cause to excuse that juror at this point.”