Simpson Juror Accuses Ito of Failing to Get Her $2,000 : Courts: The woman says the judge keep her on the panel by promising to have the court repay her for lost rental income.

During her long months as a juror in the O.J. Simpson murder trial, Anise Aschenbach was happy to call Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito “Your Honor.”

He was nice enough to her, Aschenbach thought, and seemed to be an honorable man.

But on Wednesday, when a visitor to her Norwalk bungalow merely mentioned Ito’s name, Aschenbach’s response was quick and bitter.

“That jerk,” she said.

Aschenbach is angry at Ito for reneging on what she interpreted as his promise to reimburse her for $2,000 she lost on a rental property while she and other Simpson jurors were sequestered for nine months.

She said she has already tried to sue Ito for the money in Small Claims Court but was told she could not because he was immune as a judge performing courtroom duties.

So now Aschenbach, a 61-year-old gas company retiree, is doing the next best thing: airing her beef in public.

“Maybe I can at least embarrass him,” she said. “I want people know what occurred.”

It was in September, a month before the jury acquitted Simpson of murdering his ex-wife and her friend, that news reports first revealed that a woman known only as Juror 1290 was asking Ito to dismiss her so she could deal with the problem of renting vacant rental property. She said she had lost several thousand dollars because sequestration made it impossible to meet prospective renters.

At the time, sources familiar with the issue said Ito had met with the juror in chambers and said he would try to get her some assistance to enable her to continue serving. That appeared to settle the matter--a relief to Ito, who had already lost 10 jurors and had only two alternates left.

However, last month Ito wrote Aschenbach that “no statutory authority exists” for the court to reimburse her.

Now, armed with the letters she sent to Ito and his Nov. 21 response, plus a transcript of a private meeting in which she said the promise was made, Aschenbach is talking to anyone who will listen.

What makes her even madder than the broken promise, she said, is that she recently learned a radio station raised $700 for her and took it to Ito when her plight became public three months ago.

“He kept it one day and sent it back [to the radio station] saying the matter had been resolved,” Aschenbach said.

Ito is on vacation until next month and could not be reached for comment. A spokeswoman said she knew nothing of the matter.

Aschenbach, who said she has turned down a book deal and $200,000 in offers from tabloids and television shows to tell of her experiences as a Simpson juror, insists that if Ito had dismissed her from the jury things would not have come to this.

She said she informed the judge as early as July--six months into the trial--of the financial loss she was taking on a vacant Maywood duplex.

In August, she said, she scribbled another note to Ito, letting him know that with the loss of the rent and the cost of rental ads in local papers, she was losing $1,000 a month and had been forced to dip into her savings.

The situation “is on my mind much of the time and I feel like I must leave (sanctioned or otherwise) as it is just too stressful,” Aschenbach said in her note.

She also asked for the first time if Ito could find some way for the court to pay her the lost rent.

Ito responded by equipping her with a pager to receive calls from prospective tenants and an escort to the Maywood property to interview them--to no avail.

In September, Aschenbach wrote Ito again, telling him that she was fed up, leaving the jury and would be picked up the next day by her daughter. That prompted the judge to meet with her to discuss the matter.

According to a transcript of that Sept. 12 meeting, after Aschenbach outlined her situation in detail, Ito told her:

“If I can make arrangements, let me--let me see about getting you reimbursed for those three months [during which the duplex was vacant], or at least a substantial amount of it.”

He also offered to have a law clerk stay at the property during the day to receive applications and to arrange for a real estate manager (the friend of another judge) to handle renting the property, the transcript says.

Aschenbach said she accepted the offers, but told Ito that she only needed $2,000 because it typically took her a month to rent the property.

The property was finally rented Oct. 1, two days before Simpson’s acquittal. But Aschenbach said she still expected the $2,000.

In November, when she had received no word about the money, she sent Ito another note, saying she needed the money to pay her property taxes.

Ten days later, he responded with a letter.

“I regret to advise you that I have been unsuccessful in obtaining reimbursement for your loss of rental income during your jury service on the case of People v. Simpson,” Ito wrote.

“The legal research done by myself and the court’s legal research staff indicates that no statutory authority exists for the court to order the expenditure of public funds to compensate a juror for the loss of rental income due to difficulties in finding a suitable tenant while on jury duty,” he added.

Aschenbach now believes Ito was stringing her along to keep her on the Simpson jury.

“How can [Ito] say he didn’t know what the law was?” she said Wednesday. “He’s not that dumb.”

In September, Ito had referred to unspecified precedents for reimbursing Aschenbach and noted that he had arranged for one Simpson juror to attend an out-of-state funeral and obtained assistance with medical treatment for another. Superior Court Judge William R. Pounders said at the time that he had helped get a county job for a juror who had spent a year on the McMartin child molestation case and whose company had gone out of business.

Simpson’s lawyers, however, opposed Ito paying Aschenbach directly, as did some jury experts, who speculated that it could cause her problems with fellow jurors who might become jealous that she was being paid more than twice the $5 a day they all had received up until that time.

But Aschenbach said Wednesday that all the other Simpson jurors knew about her attempt to get the court to pay her rent and were supportive.

The other jurors, all of whom were being paid their regular salaries by their employers or had other income, “were cheering me on,” she said.