Ito Appears to Have Defused Juror Revolt, Sources Say : Simpson case: Testimony in the trial is expected to resume today. Both sides get insight into the panel.

Wearing spring clothes and bright smiles, insurgent jurors in the O.J. Simpson murder trial returned to the courthouse Monday for private meetings with Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito, who sources said appears to have defused a crisis that last week threatened to push the proceedings toward mistrial.

Ito spent the day winding up a delicate round of counseling jurors and also met behind closed doors with five employees of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, including three deputies ousted from the jury detail at Ito’s request. Although testimony was expected to resume today, the judge’s inquiry into allegations of jury discontent still has not concluded; he plans more meetings with deputies and expects to visit the hotel where the jury is sequestered, according to a statement released by the court.

Last week’s jury strike, and the events surrounding it, have given both sides fresh insight into the panel selected to decide Simpson’s fate--and a sharper look at the pitfalls faced by prosecutors and defense lawyers as they try to sway jurors in the racially charged case.

Of particular interest was the factionalism that erupted after the three deputies were reassigned. On Monday, sources described some of the group dynamics that led to the jury work stoppage, which they said appears to have been organized largely by a woman whose conduct had been fiercely criticized by an excused member of the jury.

The protest brought the murder trial to an abrupt halt Friday and raised new concerns about a mistrial. Thirteen of the 18 jurors and alternates joined in the extraordinary job action, and though support for the deputies crossed racial lines, all three black male panelists declined to back the sheriff’s contingent. All four white panelists, meanwhile, were in the group opposing the deputies’ removal.

Sources said at least one of the leaders appeared to be a 38-year-old white woman criticized by Jeanette Harris, the recently excused panelist who alleged that the jury was divided and fighting along racial lines--and who accused sheriff’s deputies of promoting the divisions. Harris said the woman juror stepped on her feet, pushed another black panelist and, with another juror, struck a colleague in the head as he watched a movie.

Some other jurors, however, interpreted those incidents differently, and on Friday a number of them signaled their dismay over the ouster of the deputies by wearing black or dark clothing.

The white woman, a Pacific Bell employee, came to court that day wearing a long black dress, marking her as a conspicuous defender of the embattled Sheriff’s Department employees.

Although the worst-case scenario--a mistrial--seems to have been averted for now, lawyers in the case remained concerned about the fallout from the latest jury outburst. The conventional wisdom has been that a mistrial would benefit the defense. But defense attorneys say they want the exoneration of an acquittal, and believe their best chance of getting one rests with the current jury.

An unusually subdued Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. said that the past few days have been “a difficult time for all of us” and that Simpson was impatient to move on.

“He’s frustrated,” Cochran said of his client, who has pleaded not guilty to the June 12 murders of Ronald Lyle Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson. “He’d like to get the trial on. He’d like to get to the defense.”

Cochran expressed optimism that the recent problems can be overcome, and several sources commended Ito’s handling of last week’s unusual flare-up. Nevertheless, some doubts persisted.

“The question,” Cochran said, is whether “there is such a schism that they can’t be fair and impartial in the evidence. That’s what we’re worried about.”

Race and the Jury

In addition to the frustration over delays, sources said one aspect of the recent friction caused particular concern to lawyers on both sides: Although support for the sheriff’s deputies crossed racial lines, the split between white women and black men on the panel bolstered some fears that Harris’ assessment of a racially divided panel may be at least partly correct.

All four of the panel’s white women--the only whites among the jurors and alternates--registered their sympathy with the sheriff’s deputies during private meetings with the judge, one source said. None of the black men shared that view. Black women, however, were divided, with some supporting the deputies and some declining to join in the protest.

Among those said to be the most pleased by the deputies’ ouster was a 25-year-old flight attendant who complained during a session last week that she could not stand to remain on the jury any longer. Sources said that woman was alarmed in part because she woke up from a nap one afternoon to find a deputy inside her room. The experience badly rattled her, sources said, and turned her into one of the Sheriff’s Department’s fiercest critics.

It was partly her experience--and her emotional response to it--that convinced prosecutors and defense lawyers to support Ito’s request that the deputies be transferred, sources said. When Ito made that request Thursday, the Sheriff’s Department complied, though Sheriff Sherman Block publicly assailed the move as unnecessary and inappropriate.

Ito has stressed repeatedly that he has found no misconduct on the part of deputies or jurors, but sources said he requested the transfers in an attempt to restore some harmony to the tense jury. The dispute has offered both sides a rare glimpse into the life of a sequestered jury and has confounded some of the early predictions about how race and law enforcement would intersect in the Simpson trial.

During one celebrated pretrial hearing, Deputy Dist. Atty. Christopher A. Darden warned that if defense lawyers were allowed to question a Los Angeles police detective about his alleged use of a vicious racial epithet, it would polarize the jury and turn its black members irrevocably against law enforcement.

Despite that concern, Ito allowed defense lawyers to air the epithet, which attorney F. Lee Bailey used in his cross-examination of Detective Mark Fuhrman, who denied ever having uttered it during the past 10 years. Darden had feared any uttering of the so-called “n word” in court, but some of the most emotional support for the deputies in the recent flare-up has come from two black women on the panel.

According to sources, those women cried as they spoke to Ito about the deputies being reassigned. Some observers attribute a portion of that emotion to a bonding similar to one sometimes experienced by hostages. Defense lawyers, concerned about the implications of the jurors becoming too close to law enforcement employees, filed a motion earlier this month asking that the Sheriff’s Department be replaced by a non-law enforcement agency.

Monday, Cochran said the defense would seek to “enhance” that motion in light of the recent jury uproar.

The affection that many jurors expressed for the sheriff’s deputies highlights one of the defense team’s gravest fears. They have based much of their case on alleging a police conspiracy to frame Simpson and on sowing distrust of law enforcement. The apparent loyalty that many jurors have toward the sheriff’s deputies could raise some question about how effective that approach has been, at least with those panelists.

Mistrial Chances Fade

The jury’s outburst last week raised the specter of a mistrial in the Simpson case in two ways--by suggesting that the jury is so divided that it might never be able to reach verdicts and by raising the question of whether the panel was so angry that Ito might declare a mistrial and seek to start over.

Although many analysts remain pessimistic about this jury reaching verdicts, they also said it would be unlikely that Ito would declare a mistrial, at least at this point. To do so, the judge would need to find that there was a “legal necessity” to halt the trial, a high standard that could be reviewed and reserved on appeal.

“Legal necessity amounts to a showing that no alternative short of aborting the trial can remedy a problem that threatens the integrity of the process,” said Peter Arenella, a UCLA law professor. “To apply that standard to this case, there would only be legal necessity if the 13 jurors persist in refusing to participate until they get their way and the three deputies are reinstated. Simple tension among jurors does not amount to legal necessity. That happens all the time.”

Laurie Levenson, a Loyola Law School professor, agreed, noting that the threshold of legal necessity only is crossed when “no other alternative can be used to rectify the jury’s problems--including further instructions from the judge, changing the conditions of sequestration or altering the trial’s pace.”

Levenson said that “based on what’s being publicly released, I don’t think Judge Ito is anywhere near that threshold. Right now, there are problems and they’re serious. But there’s no reason to believe that they can’t be handled--as the courts ordinarily handle such things--on a juror-by-juror basis.”

In fact, sources credited Ito with using the one-on-one interviews with 14 jurors and four Sheriff’s Department employees to defuse the potentially volatile situation and to put the trial back on track. During the sessions, sources said, Ito patiently and comfortingly heard out the various jurors’ concerns, allowing them to vent their frustrations and to return to the task they have been asked to perform.

Ito interviewed four sheriff’s deputies Monday, including the three whose transfer he requested. He expects to interview two more, probably today, according to a court spokeswoman.

Trial to Resume

With the jury crisis apparently in check, the trial is expected to resume this morning with the continuation of the cross-examination of criminalist Andrea Mazzola. A relative newcomer to the Los Angeles Police Department, Mazzola had only processed three LAPD crime scenes before the morning of June 13, but she received a commendation for her work on her first scene and prosecutor Hank Goldberg tried during her questioning last week to show that she was a competent, careful evidence collector.

Peter Neufeld, one of the scientific specialists on the Simpson defense team, began his cross-examination of Mazzola before the jury’s work stoppage halted him. In his initial questioning, Neufeld belittled Mazzola’s credentials and suggested that she was changing certain aspects of her testimony to conform with that of her embattled supervisor, Dennis Fung.

Neufeld is set to resume today, and Mazzola is expected to be on the stand for most if not all of today’s session. Next up is expected to be Bernie Douroux, a tow truck driver who towed Simpson’s Ford Bronco, the vehicle that prosecutors argue was used in the crimes and that turned up stained with blood.

The long cross-examination of Fung, the first witness called as part of the prosecution’s physical evidence case, has prolonged that phase of the evidence presentation, and another few witnesses are scheduled to testify before the government moves into the presentation of its crucial DNA evidence. Government lawyers say they hope the tow truck driver and at least one other witness, Greg Matheson of the LAPD lab, could complete their testimony in a few days, but concede that it could take much longer, depending on the cross-examination.

The DNA portion of the government case could last four to five weeks. Once the DNA evidence is presented, only a few loose ends would likely remain for the prosecution to tie up before turning the case over to the defense, perhaps in June.

Times staff writer Tim Rutten contributed to this article.