Part Captor, Part Friend, Bailiffs Play Delicate Role

One bailiff whipped up a mean spaghetti dinner. Another sang a rousing rendition of “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” A few stayed awake all night to console their stressed-out charges.

Assigned to monitor jurors in tense trials nationwide, bailiffs have often forged friendships with the people they trailed from dining room to video room to bathroom to bedroom.

In Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Santa Ana, Los Angeles--wherever celebrated cases have drawn publicity and forced sequestered panels--bailiffs have danced between delicate roles. They are both captors and confidants. They may crack down with punishing rules one day or crack up with hilarious revelry the next.

As the bizarre saga of the O.J. Simpson jury reveals, some sequestered jurors may feel an intense loyalty toward their bailiffs. Much as hostages may identify with their captors, panelists may come to trust and appreciate their guards--who are, after all, their only links with the real world.

“We knew if we had any problems, we could go to them,” said Theodora Replogle, a juror in Orange County’s 1989 trial of serial killer Randy Steven Kraft. “You don’t get really personally close, but you feel like you knew them. Like your mother or your dad.”

Such quick bonding makes sense: Tossed into stifling sequestration together, intent on carrying out a civic duty as painlessly as possibly, jurors and bailiffs have a lot in common.

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Of course, frictions inevitably develop--sometimes as serious as what led Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito to boot three sheriff’s deputies off the Simpson trial earlier this week.

But often, said former jurors and bailiffs who have endured sequestration together, the tensions helped bring them closer. In the Simpson case, a majority of the 18 jurors and alternates apparently empathize with their guards, who protect them even as they restrict their freedom.

To protest Ito’s ouster of the three deputies, 13 panelists on Friday refused to hear testimony.

“It’s like some of the jurors have been stripped of their security blanket,” said Houston-based jury consultant Robert B. Hirschhorn. “Isn’t it interesting that six jurors were dismissed and we didn’t have a protest from their colleagues and now three of their keepers are dismissed and we do have a protest?”

Ironically, one of the rebels, a 38-year-old woman, had told Ito shortly after sequestration began that she was “still having trouble” viewing the bailiffs “as my protectors and not my captors.”

Apparently that juror had warmed up to the sheriff’s deputies by Friday, following a pattern that participants in other tough trials across the county readily recognize.

Like the Simpson panelist, Cincinnati juror John P. Brady said he found it tough, at first, to define the proper relationship between the guards and the guarded. He felt as though he were breaking the rules when he first started hanging out with court constable Steve Donnellon, who served as chief guard during a lengthy banking fraud trial.

“I kept asking him, ‘Is this cool?’ ” Brady recounted. “I always had this concern that I might inadvertently blow the trial. But he kept saying, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ ” Reassured, Brady said, he and his guard began to “pal around” throughout a 10-day sequestration. The other jurors followed suit.

“We all got along famously,” Donnellon agreed.

The bank fraud case ended eight years ago, but Donnellon still remembers the Christmas gift jurors gave him--a music-playing necktie. He also recalls the anti-stress regimen he implemented during deliberations: daily scream sessions out the window of a penthouse hotel suite. “It made everyone laugh,” he said.

In the Cincinnati trial and others around the country, former jurors recall their bailiffs dashing out on an evening beer run, finagling a grill for a rooftop barbecue and belting out songs during the daily drive from hotel to courtroom.

Sometimes, however, guards’ duties are more somber.

One of the sheriff’s deputies dismissed this week from the Simpson case, Paula Tokar, had to accompany a juror to Missouri for her sister’s funeral. The bereaved juror “was effusive in her thanks to Tokar for her sensitivity and her kindness,” said Assistant Sheriff Mike Graham, the department’s third-ranking official.

Like the 21 other deputies assigned to the Simpson case, Tokar volunteered for the duty--which requires three 12-hour shifts each week. “They all wanted it,” Graham said. “But I’m not sure, in hindsight, they would make the same decision.”

In the delicate relationship between bailiffs and jurors, the guards would seem to wield all the power: They have the uniforms, the guns, the information and the freedom to march home after each shift. They monitor the phone calls, pick the restaurants, chaperon the field trips.

Yet even as they control, they must serve.

“We waited on them hand and foot,” said Indianapolis court officer Jeannie Motsinger, who guarded the jury in a 1993 murder trial. As a result, she said, “I think everyone bonded together. We were a real close group.”

Such tight camaraderie, however, can create opportunities for misconduct.

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In one notorious example, a bailiff in the 1985 corruption trial of former San Diego Mayor Roger Hedgecock told jurors he believed the politician was guilty of conspiracy and perjury. The bailiff later admitted that he partied with some jurors, plied them with liquor and urged them to resolve the case quickly. After the bailiff’s confession, Hedgecock’s conviction was overturned.

Judge Ito has assured the Sheriff’s Department that none of the three deputies removed from the Simpson case was guilty of misconduct, Graham said.

“He was removing the deputies for the purpose of (restoring) harmony,” Graham said. Reflecting on the turmoil that ensued Friday, he added wryly: “Obviously, he was not right.”

Times staff writers Henry Weinstein, Kenneth Reich and Andrea Ford contributed to this story.