Simpson Jury Pool Racially Mixed

The second phase of jury selection in O.J. Simpson’s civil trial wrapped up Wednesday with a racially mixed pool of 102 candidates--including some who think the defendant has been wrongly accused and others who acknowledge a gut feeling that he’s a murderer.

Going into the selection process, jury consultants and legal analysts had predicted that the Santa Monica court would draw mostly white candidates, including many retirees and white-collar professionals. Court statistics, after all, showed a pool that was 79% white.

But the final group of potential jurors is nearly evenly split, with about 50 white and 40 black candidates, and a handful of Latinos and Asian Americans as well. Superior Court Judge Hiroshi Fujisaki hopes to winnow the pool down to an impartial panel of a dozen jurors and eight alternates.

“It is not the jury we were led to believe it would be,” said Loyola Law School Dean Laurie Levenson, who has attended many of the court sessions. “People thought this case would be a walk through the park for the plaintiffs, that all they had to do was show up and they’d have a jury that was 80% white and hostile to O.J. But that’s not who’s coming through the door.”

Given the stark racial divide that has emerged during jury selection--with many blacks supporting Simpson and most whites leaning against him--the demographics of the panel could be critical.

It is unclear why the pool’s ethnic makeup has swerved so far from the court’s statistical profile. Analysts suggest that perhaps the length and notoriety of the Simpson trial attracted some groups and scared off others, or that the court’s effort to summon 4,000 people for jury duty at once could have skewed the demographics. Another possibility, of course, is simple random chance.

Beverly Hills attorney Paul R. Kiesel, who has tried many civil cases in Santa Monica, said he never knows what to expect when he shows up in the seaside courthouse. The jury pool, he said, often defies both stereotype and statistics and includes a broad mix of people from all walks of life. “You can never generalize about who will show up on any one day, for any one panel,” Kiesel said.

The 102 candidates who have made the cut will return to court next week to answer additional questions from attorneys on their attitudes toward touchstone issues such as police abuse, domestic violence and racism.

Those still in the running include postal workers, hospital employees, a house painter, a bill collector and a Time magazine journalist. Several are religious, even quoting from the Bible while answering attorneys’ questions. Others favored less lofty language, like the man who said of Simpson, “The dude’s an idiot,” and the one who described house guest Kato Kaelin as a “deadbeat who . . . looked like a druggie.”

Several jurors still in the pool said they are doubtful that one person acting alone could have carried out the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman on June 12, 1994. Some have said they think corrupt officers may have planted evidence to frame Simpson; others insisted that the police were diligent and professional in investigating the double homicide.

A woman whose brother donated money to the Ronald Goldman Justice Fund remains in the pool, as does a woman whose father bought O.J. Simpson’s video.

And then there are at least half a dozen candidates who say they know nothing at all about the case--including one middle-aged black woman who could not even name the victims when asked. “I wasn’t really interested,” another of the jurors said Wednesday, insisting that she has never had a discussion or voiced an opinion about the Simpson case.

For all the diversity of opinion, two dominant themes have emerged during the 12 days of jury selection. A good many potential panelists--even those who think Simpson is guilty--believe that police mishandled the homicide investigation. And many consider former LAPD Det. Mark Fuhrman a racist liar.

Since Fuhrman pleaded no contest to a felony perjury charge last week--and was served with a subpoena to testify in the civil trial--lawyers have gingerly probed prospective jurors’ attitudes toward the former detective.

Several were excused when they acknowledged that they would no longer be able to trust anything Fuhrman says on the witness stand. Others were retained when they promised that they could evaluate him fairly.

One potential juror, a middle-aged white man who deemed Simpson “probably guilty,” said Wednesday that his opinion of Fuhrman “would be one of the more difficult things to set aside because it goes to credibility.”

Nonetheless, he promised to try hard to keep an open mind. The judge refused a defense plea to dismiss the man, who also said that domestic violence “definitely sets the stage” for murder and called Simpson’s flight from arrest five days after the killings “not the actions of an innocent man.”

The defense will have another crack at ousting the man from the jury pool during the third stage of questioning, set to begin Tuesday. But Levenson predicted that lawyers will not find it easy to unearth biases in the next phase.

In the round of questioning completed Wednesday, jurors were asked to talk about the case in terms of their exposure to publicity--what they saw, heard, read or discussed.

They may have felt more comfortable divulging their opinions in this phase, Levenson said, because they could qualify them with disclaimers, such as “from what I heard in the media” or “from what my friends told me.” In contrast, the upcoming phase will force jurors to respond point-blank to uncomfortable queries about emotional issues such as racism.

“When you ask them straight on, they tend to cover themselves and get embarrassed,” Levenson said, “but when you ask them, ‘What have other people told you about the case?’ it’s not as threatening.”

The next round, she said, will not “hit as pointedly at some of the biases.”