Jury Flexes Its Muscles and Ito Pulls No Punches

Every day at noon, the O.J. Simpson jurors and alternates walk quickly from the courtroom across the ninth-floor hallway and head downstairs for lunch.

For the most part, they’re a grim-faced lot as they pass the reporters, who are kept behind red lines to separate them from the panelists. Marching single file, the jurors remind me of soldiers warily traversing a hostile land.

But Friday, I thought I detected smiles on some of their faces. Two jurors had complained about a couple of reporters talking in the courtroom the day before and Judge Lance A. Ito, acting quickly, had banned the journalists from the rest of the trial.

Based on the dialogue between Ito and jury prospects during the voir dire part of the trial months ago, there is little affection among them for the reporters covering the case. So there must have been cheers around the juror dinner table after the judge acted Thursday.

The jurors can add the reporters’ names to a growing list of trophies. Previously they forced the removal of three sheriff’s deputy guards. In addition, several members of the jury Friday asked Ito to speed up the trial. They requested that the Friday half sessions be extended into the afternoons, and that court be held Saturday mornings. Ito is considering their request.

Talk about juror power.

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For the reporters on the O.J. beat, the biggest news was the judge’s removal of journalists Kristen Jeanette-Meyers of Court TV and Gale Holland of USA Today from the courtroom for the duration of the trial.

I was nowhere near the courtroom when it happened but my immediate reaction was one of terror. Ito, trying to bring the trial under control, has become such a martinet that he reminds me of the teachers who used to give me Ds in citizenship for talking and trying to be the class clown.

His order Thursday said he had “received notes from two jurors complaining of noise created by two news reporters in the audience section of the courtroom.” One juror said Jeanette-Meyers and Holland “are constantly whispering, which distracts my attention for brief moments of time. It happened yesterday and also this morning.” The other juror said merely that “a few members in the audience are whispering a little loud.”

With this slim evidence, Ito declared that “any unwarranted disruption of a court proceeding is good cause for the court to take appropriate action. . . . Talking or whispering amongst audience members while court is in session is never acceptable behavior, especially when it interferes with the jury’s ability to hear the evidence.”

The two reporters, he said, are barred from his courtroom.

As expected, many other reporters didn’t like it.

Personally, I felt that Jeanette-Meyers and Holland shouldn’t have talked under any circumstances, even if they saw smoke coming out of Ito’s wastebasket. He had previously kicked out the representative of the Malibu Times for talking, an event that I thought was a tip-off to a get-tough policy.

But he could have given Jeanette-Meyers and Holland a warning before imposing a trial-long ban that may hurt their careers.

This is like sentencing them to Folsom Prison because they jaywalked. I figure the judge must have been reading baseball history and was impressed by Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the baseball commissioner who banned eight members of the Chicago “Black Sox” from the game for life the day after a jury acquitted them of throwing the 1919 World Series.

If Judge Ito follows the example of Judge Landis, there will be no changing his stern decree.

But the reporters tried. About 30 of them signed a letter to Ito asking him to reconsider, and protesting the harshness of a punishment given without warning.

Another reporter, Dennis Schatzman of the Los Angeles Sentinel, who once was a lower-court judge in Pittsburgh, wrote Ito as one jurist to another, asking for reconsideration.

After all, Schatzman said, “He who is without sin is not in the room.” He reminded Ito of “your most recent faux pas,” congratulating one of the jurors for catching a foul ball during last Friday’s Dodger game. “Did you think that by revealing that information in open court you may have opened the door for possible exposure of one or more jurors?” Schatzman asked. “Many people videotape sports events. My experience is that the cameras routinely follow foul balls into the stands and capture the faces of the people who catch them.”

I asked the court spokeswoman, Jerrianne Hayslett, if Ito would change his mind. “As of now,” she said, “it [his order] is very definite.”

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The reporters’ troubles are more interesting to the journalists than to the public.

But often the media are a mirror of the world, and what happened to Jeanette-Meyers and Holland is a reflection of what is occurring in the trial.

Ito clearly wants to keep the jury intact so the trial can be completed. The recent jurors’ strike alerted him to trouble among them and he moved quickly to appease the jury members.

The strike has worked, the revolution has succeeded. Now it is claiming its victims just as the French Revolution did two centuries ago.