Juror Dismissals Are Not a Black and White Issue

The media told a flawed, incomplete story in its first reports of racial strife on the O.J. Simpson jury.

That’s clear from reading the transcript of Judge Lance A. Ito’s lengthy investigation into trouble on what has become jurisprudence’s most analyzed jury.

The race angle has always been an undertone in this saga of a famed black athlete accused of killing two white people, one of them his ex-wife. But it remained no more than that until a dismissed African American juror, Jeanette Harris, told a story of racial discord and of discrimination by the sheriff’s deputies who guard the jury. Comments from a black juror dismissed later, Willie Cravin, added to the picture.

Their statements were splashed in print and at the top of news broadcasts. The whisper became a shout, giving support to a theory that race is a dominant factor in the case.

The Ito transcripts show that black and white jurors played down the racial factor and, in fact, said Cravin was a troublemaker.

The initial reports, though, are the ones that stick. They have given an exaggerated racial spin to the story, which is disturbing in a racially tense city.

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The reports of discord emerged in April when Harris was interviewed on KCAL-TV just after she was dismissed for failing to disclose complaints she had filed that her husband had abused her. She described a jury divided along racial lines, with some sheriff’s deputies “promoting” the discord.

With a court rule forbidding reporters from talking to jurors, the media was unable to check out the Harris account, or get another view.

All through April and May, a tape of Harris accompanied many television stories on the jury. The articulate Harris, smoother with every appearance, expanded her horizons beyond KCAL-TV.

In June, she was joined by Cravin, who hit the TV circuit with his story. He was dismissed, he said, because “it was racial, a personal vendetta against me. The prosecution made up their mind to go after me as soon as it was clear that those other two [white jurors] were gone.”

But the transcripts, released this month, showed that Cravins was viewed as disruptive by both black and white jurors.

“He is telling younger ones . . . what to say, how to maneuver,” a 71-year-old African American woman said. “All that is wrong.”

A 37-year-old African American woman said Cravin got mad when she talked. “Sometimes I talk a little loud,” she said, “and he . . . wants control [and says] can you keep it down? . . . It irritates me because I like to talk.”

There wasn’t much support in the transcripts for Harris’ charges of racial bias by the deputies.

A 43-year-old African American man said he didn’t like the way he was awakened by a deputy while taking a nap on a park bench. The deputy feared that the man would be photographed by one of the Simpson story’s paparazzi, but the man said “it kind of reminds [me] why so many black men in America have such a problem being confronted with white police officers.” A 38-year-old black woman said one deputy makes sure certain jurors are watched “at all times, but then other jurors could be in the same room on a different occasion and there is no one watching them.”

But when Judge Ito asked if “there has been anything that the sheriffs have done that makes you feel that they are prompting a racial tension, a racial animosity between the jurors,” she answered “no.”

When a young black woman began telling Ito her feelings about the dismissals, she said “I’m probably going to need some tissue.” Ito’s clerk helpfully said, “On your desk, judge.”

The juror said one dismissed deputy “was really the only deputy I felt comfortable talking [with] about anything, discussing the problems that I had, you know, personal, work-related.” And a woman deputy, she said, was “the only deputy that cried with me” when a family member died. “She even teared up when I thought I was losing my job due to a layoff,” she said.

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Like the other reporters on the Simpson case, I was a prisoner of incomplete information.

A well-known jury consultant, Terri Waller of the National Jury Project, had warned me that Harris might not be telling the whole story.

“Jeanette Harris could only talk about her own ideas and her own perceptions,” she said at the time. “Some of the rest of the jurors might have had other ideas.”

But there was no way to follow up. As I mentioned earlier, when Harris talked on KCAL-TV, we were not permitted to deal with her sensational charges in our customary manner, to check with other jurors and the sheriff’s deputies.

Los Angeles, which doesn’t need any more racial tension, would have been stuck with the Harris version if it had not been for a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, several media organizations and dismissed juror Francine Florio-Bunten.

Florio-Bunten said she had been falsely accused of promoting a book and wanted her side of the story made public.

The ACLU and the news organizations just wanted all the information out in the open.

Thanks to their efforts, we now know that the trouble on the Simpson jury had more to do with human relations than it did with race relations.