Ex-Simpson Jurors’ Views Differ Sharply : Publication: In book, Michael Knox says he is leaning toward a guilty verdict. But he adds that prosecutors have fumbled badly.

Although he started out sympathetic to O.J. Simpson, ousted juror Michael Knox began to change his mind as soon as he heard the opening statements of prosecutors Christopher A. Darden and Marcia Clark, he writes in his forthcoming book, “The Private Diary of an O.J. Juror.”

“I felt sorry for O.J. I had made no judgments about his guilt or innocence. But for the first time, I heard the prosecution outline evidence that was overwhelming,” Knox states in the book, which he wrote with National Enquirer columnist Mike Walker.

He says he was profoundly affected by the gory crime scene photographs of murder victims Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman, particularly those of Goldman showing he had been “butchered” by “a madman.” Knox added: “This murder had passion and frenzy written all over it.”

He says the presentation by Clark and Darden on the trial’s opening day had a “devastating” impact on the jury. “At the end of the day . . . I sat with the other black jurors and realized immediately that they had been as deeply affected by what we’d heard as I had.” He stated, however, that the jurors did not discuss the presentation.

Knox was dismissed from the panel March 1 but says he has continued to follow the case. “Based on the evidence I’ve heard and seen--particularly the strong blood evidence--I’m leaning toward a verdict of guilty,” Knox wrote on May 30. He added that he will not make a final judgment until he has heard closing arguments.

He is considerably less praiseworthy of the prosecutors than of their evidence:

“Marcia Clark, Christopher Darden and the rest of the prosecution team had a great case, but they never knew how to present it. They just couldn’t keep it sharp and simple. They fumbled and fretted, continually conferring with each other. . . . Sometimes they got it together, but mostly their presentation was truly pathetic; sloppy, badly organized and rarely eloquent--even though the evidence itself was powerful.”

Knox states that because of his views on the way American society operates, it was difficult for him to come to grips with his feelings that Simpson might be guilty.

“For the black jurors, Simpson was one of our own. He was a brother and he was in trouble. . . . I know it’s difficult and frustrating for white people to understand, but the deeply held belief in our community is that black men who rise high are eventually brought down by the white Establishment; and that the police are quick to railroad black men.”

Knox was dismissed from the panel by Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito after the judge learned that Knox had failed to divulge on a juror questionnaire that he had once been arrested for kidnaping his girlfriend--a charge that was dropped immediately.

The 47-year-old Federal Express worker does not deny that the incident occurred. But he contends that Clark and Darden, apparently believing he was pro-defense, instigated the investigation that led to his dismissal.

“They had me kicked off the jury because of their ‘expert’ opinion” that his wearing a San Francisco 49ers cap and jacket the day jurors visited the murder scene and Simpson’s Brentwood mansion “meant I was hopelessly biased in favor of O.J. no matter what the evidence,” Knox says.

In the 300-page book, he also describes deep interracial and intra-racial fissures among the jury. He is skeptical about the defense’s theory that the Los Angeles Police Department conspired against Simpson, but praises the former football star’s attorneys.

Knox declares that racial divisions surfaced among the original 12 jurors and 12 alternates the very first time they gathered to eat lunch at their hotel Jan. 11. Blacks, who made up 15 of the 24 panelists, went to two tables; whites and Latinos went to a third, he says.

Soon, Knox states, there also were divisions among African American panelists. In particular, he movingly describes the anger he felt when an elderly black male alternate treated him venomously after discovering that Knox had a white foster child. Ultimately, Knox said he and this man stopped speaking after the man, given the pseudonym “Mr. Johnson” in the book, chastised him for “kissing up” to white jurors, with whom Knox was friendly.

As angered as he was by this treatment, Knox nonetheless states his belief that the man’s attitudes stemmed from the searing experiences he had with “wide-open racism” growing up in the Deep South. “He’d seen the flaming crosses of the Ku Klux Klan back in times so bad that a black man could be randomly stopped on the streets and whipped by white supremacists, who feared no retaliation from the law.”

Knox takes sharp issue with ex-juror Jeanette Harris’ allegations that sheriff’s deputies showed favoritism toward the white panelists. And he derides former juror Willie Cravin as “a bully.” Harris declined any comment Saturday on Knox, while Cravin denied the charge, saying, “I am a Christian; I sing in two church choirs.”

Attorney Milton Grimes, who represents both Cravin and Harris, called Knox “a fraud who intended to write a book from the beginning.” That contention is “irresponsible and untrue,” said Knox’s publisher, Michael Viner, president of Dove Books.

The $5.99 paperback book is due to go on sale this week.

Knox concedes that at the start of his jury service he was “secretly looking forward to a vacation” from work and family responsibilities. But he soon discovered that he and his fellow panelists were in a posh prison, an upscale unnamed hotel, treated like inmates, their every word and move constantly scrutinized and shadowed by “Big Brother” bailiffs.

Knox praises dismissed panelist Francine Florio-Bunten for successfully lobbying Ito to get the deputies to wear civilian clothes at the hotel on weekends to minimize the “prison-like environment.”

He contends that the sequestration process was an abysmal failure and exacerbated the tensions of being a juror in the trial.

“Don’t sequester juries. PERIOD!” he urges. “Let them live at home. People have better judgment than lawyers and judges think. . . . I can live in my home at night, then attend court in the morning and make a fair judgment on the evidence. . . . Sequestering jurors makes them crazy.”

Knox states that sequestration had the most severe impact on Tracy Hampton, a 26-year-old flight attendant, who was hospitalized after Ito excused her.