Indifference to Simpson Found in Jury Pool

Ever since that slow-speed Bronco chase bumped a championship basketball game off television, O.J. Simpson’s been a national obsession.

Or so we thought.

Turns out, a surprising number of Los Angeles County residents under consideration to serve on the jury for Simpson’s civil trial say they completely ignored the hubbub. They tuned out the media babble, walked past the water-cooler gossips, didn’t give the man, his trial or his acquittals so much as a thought.

Or so they say in court.

Confounding attorneys and legal analysts, at least six potential jurors insist they know nothing, and more than a dozen others say they have no opinions on the subject at all.

One woman, a bill collector for a utility company, said none of her friends, family members or co-workers ever expressed any opinion on any aspect of the Simpson case. Neither, she said, did she. Asked if she knew the name Johnnie Cochran, she paused. “I think he was one of the attorneys,” she said. “Wasn’t he?”

Explanations for ignorance or indifference ranged from the intellectual (“I was too occupied with the disintegration of Yugoslavia”) to the philosophical (“If he did it, higher powers will take care of him”) to the practical (“The news depresses me. I try to avoid it”).

Such excuses apparently satisfy Superior Court Judge Hiroshi Fujisaki, who has kept most of these candidates in the jury pool.

But the lawyers handling the case clearly wonder: Are these people for real?

Urging the judge to oust the bill collector from the panel despite her claims of ignorance, attorney Paul Callan, who represents the estate of Nicole Brown Simpson, said he found it “very, very difficult to believe that a person who reads, listens to the radio from time to time and watches TV from time to time could know absolutely nothing about the case.” Lead Simpson attorney Robert C. Baker has said as much himself, though he did not challenge the bill collector. “Everyone has opinions about this case--you’d have to be living in a cave not to,” he said at one point.

Still, given that national polls indicate only three in five Americans can name Al Gore as the vice president, some legal analysts say they’re inclined to give these would-be jurors the benefit of the doubt and assume they’re telling the truth. It’s possible, they say, to be utterly out of it when it comes to current events. “Even something as monumental as the Simpson trial could theoretically have passed the radar screen of these people,” said Southwestern University law professor Robert Pugsley.

A soft-spoken college student said she paid so little attention to the Simpson trial that she didn’t even realize he had been acquitted until her parents called and happened to mention the verdicts. A preschool teacher in her 20s told lawyers she was too busy working and studying to care about the case. “I don’t even know when it started or when it ended,” she said with a smile. “I have no opinion about anything.”

And a mother of two responded to most questions with a blank look and an “I don’t know.” Asked what she knew about the relationship between O.J. and Nicole Simpson, she answered: “I didn’t even know Mr. O.J. Simpson was married.”

Lois Heaney, a senior trial consultant with the National Jury Project in Oakland, said, “There are probably some people for whom the saturation point hit early and they basically stopped listening.” But most people know that being neutral is the best way to get on the jury, she added, so “you have to be suspicious of those claims.”

USC law professor Erwin Chemerinsky put it more bluntly: “If they tell me that they have no opinion, my instinct is, they’re lying.”

Of course, there could be a less sinister explanation for not admitting recognition of names like Kato Kaelin, Al Cowlings and Philip Vannatter, for not expressing an opinion about whether police framed Simpson.

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At least where the Simpson trial is concerned, it could seem somewhat hip to be clueless.

“It’s been covered so much in the tabloids,” said Jack Nachbar, a professor of popular culture at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, that the whole Simpson subject has taken on a tawdry glow. “It’s probably a little bit of a status symbol to be uninterested,” he said.

Indeed, though pollsters estimated last year that 40 million Americans could not tear themselves away from the televised trial, confessing to an all-consuming interest in Marcia Clark’s hair or Johnnie Cochran’s rhetoric can sound just a tad bit tacky these days. It’s like admitting you spend hours debating the plot twists of soap operas.

Such guilt might be prompting some potential jurors to deny even a passing interest in the case, some analysts said.

“They worry it will not seem as though they are a well-rounded person with a life if they spent all that time watching the case,” said Dr. Carole Lieberman, a psychiatrist and assistant professor at UCLA who studies the impact of media on society. Put on the spot in open court, when a stern-faced judge and a table-full of lawyers “are deciding whether they’re smart enough, fair enough, good enough to be on the jury, they are going to be all the more eager to hide their shame,” she added.

To be sure, some of the prospective jurors are quite willing to talk about their exposure to the case. Yet at least a dozen who acknowledge following the criminal trial deny ever forming or expressing an opinion, saying they stuck to strict neutrality even as those around them buzzed with clashing points of view.

Explaining his objectivity, one man told attorneys: “When I watched it, I watched it as entertainment--I didn’t really think deeply into it.” A woman insisted that though she chatted about the trial with her bowling league, she never drew conclusions. “To us it was like a movie,” she said. “I wasn’t too concerned about opinions.”

That professed impartiality seems incredible to some analysts. If people have invested time in watching or talking about the case, they said, they’re bound to have thought through at least some of the evidence.

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“Someone who’s been in a coma or been away at a workplace that’s very isolated may have no opinion,” said UCLA law professor Paul Bergman. “But if someone’s worked in a place where [colleagues express] a lot of opinions, in their heart of hearts, they must have some feeling about whether justice was or was not done.”

If they’re keeping those innermost feelings to themselves, however, the judge has no grounds to oust them from the jury pool, as Daniel M. Petrocelli, attorney representing the Goldman family, found out early in the jury selection process. After questioning a young black woman who insisted she had no opinion about the case--beyond a sketchy impression that Simpson did not look like a murderer--Petrocelli urged the judge to dismiss her.

“There’s an undisclosed bias here,” he argued, insisting that the woman would favor Simpson.

“If it’s undisclosed,” Fujisaki responded, “there’s not much I can do about it.”

Staff writer Duke Helfand contributed to this story.