THE O.J. SIMPSON MURDER TRIAL : In McMartin Case, County Paid Financially Troubled Juror : Trial: Judge says his decision kept the panel intact and saved millions of dollars. But some experts think helping Simpson juror would make her favor prosecution.

Give the juror a few thousand dollars and save the county millions.

That’s the advice McMartin case judge William R. Pounders would give his colleague in the trial of O.J. Simpson.

Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito is grappling with a plea from a juror who says that her public service has put her into financial distress and that unless she gets some help she has to bail out.

Earlier this week, Ito disclosed in court that he told an unidentified juror with an unspecified hardship that he would try to help her out.

Sources told The Times that the judge told a 60-year-old white woman juror in chambers that he would try to get her some assistance in making up a $3,000 deficit on a rental property payment. This proposal generated an immediate protest from Simpson’s attorneys, who asserted that such an action would make the juror beholden to the county and produce a pro-prosecution tilt that would be unfair to their client.

Ito referred to unspecified precedents for such assistance and noted that he had arranged for transportation to an out-of-state family funeral for one juror and financial assistance for medical treatment for another. But Simpson’s lead lawyer, Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., countered that those actions were clearly distinguishable from what Ito proposed to do on the rental payment.

Although he was unwilling to comment on the specifics of this issue, Pounders said his experience in the McMartin Pre-school molestation trial, which was even lengthier and more expensive than the Simpson case, provides clear justification for giving financial aid to a juror in distress.

In 1989, during the second year of the McMartin trial, Pounders said a $60,000-a-year computer analyst who had served on the case for more than a year was suddenly faced with a huge loss of income when his employer went out of business.

After meeting with the juror and attorneys for both sides in his chambers, Pounders and other officials arranged to get the man put on the county payroll for the remainder of the case.

“We were essentially hiring him as a full-time juror,” Pounders said, although he noted that the man did some work for the county on days when the trial was not in session.

‘We matched his loss, dollar for dollar and employed him for about six months, as a county employee with the sole obligation to be a juror,” Punders said. The decision proved to be critical, the judge said, because the man wound up being one of the final 12 jurors--every alternate had to be pressed into service because six jurors dropped out. “It cost the county $15 million to put on the preliminary hearing and the first trial, and had he not remained with us, we would have had a mistrial and lost many millions of that investment,” Pounder said. “It cost the county $30,000 to save a multimillion-dollar trial.”

Pounders said he would not comment directly on the issue facing Ito, who has only two alternates remaining of the original 12, but he acknowledged that there is at least one striking similarity: “This is like McMartin: millions at risk if you don’t obtain a result from this jury,” a reference to the fact that the Simpson trial has cost the county more than $7 million so far.

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In the McMartin case, defense lawyers Danny Davis and Dean Gits agreed to Pounders’ proposal. Gits said he agreed to the unusual arrangement because “I thought the juror was conscientious and would be fair to the defense.” Davis concurred.

And indeed that juror like the other 11 voted to acquit the lawyers’ clients on 52 counts of molestation. (The jurors hung on 13 other counts on defendant Raymond Buckey, who was acquitted on remaining charges at a second trial.)

But Gits and Davis disagree over the lessons of the McMartin arrangement in this instance.

“It seems to me to be a little bit stretching to say that because the county is paying the juror and the county pays the D.A.s the juror would identify with the D.A.s,” Gits said.

Nonetheless, Davis said “this is a different deal completely. Nothing we agreed to was a direct dole. A direct dole has a clear problem of appearance.”

The attorney said if Ito can’t find a creative solution to distance himself from assisting the juror, “he must let her go before writing a check because he can lose his verdict--if there’s a conviction--by interposing himself directly in the deliberation process and writing a check would be doing that.”

But New York University law professor Stephen Gillers countered that he saw “no danger whatsoever if this woman is provided the necessary income to enable her to complete her service.

“It is to my mind irrational to suggest she would feel beholden to the prosecution as a result of this generosity. It’s not as if Marcia Clark is writing a check.”

Still, Gillers said the situation illustrates how subsistence payments of $5 a day to jurors in California are inadequate in lengthy cases: “It’s quite clear something has to be done to enrich payments to jurors in prolonged trials.

Ito has not said when he will make a decision on the issue. Gary Klausner, the presiding judge of the Los Angeles Superior Court, declined to respond to calls on the issue. A spokesman for James A. Bascue, supervising judge of the criminal division, said he would not respond to any questions pertaining to the Simpson case.