Jurors Swayed Beyond Reasonable Doubt

O.J. Simpson must have been left reeling by the $33.5-million verdict levied against him by a Santa Monica jury, but if he listened closely to some of the six men and six women who sat in judgment, he might have breathed a sigh of relief.

If this group had been judging him the first time around, when he was on trial for murder, Simpson might be facing life behind bars.

Showing a composed and united front in a news conference after their verdict Monday, five members of the civil panel signaled a near-universal disbelief of Simpson and his alibis, sympathy for the families of the victims and disdain for the defense’s conspiracy theories.

At least four of the panelists, who were not identified, said they were persuaded beyond a reasonable doubt that Simpson killed his ex-wife and her friend, even though such a high standard was not required in the civil trial. A fifth juror said she believed in Simpson’s complicity, but perhaps not beyond a reasonable doubt.

Several of the mostly white jurors, though, were careful to acknowledge that they had heard a much different case than the one presented to the largely African American jury that acquitted Simpson 16 months ago.

The only serious reservations came from one alternate juror, a middle-aged black woman, who said there were many discrepancies in the plaintiff’s case and that she found Simpson believable.

The mostly white jurors who actually sat in the jury room insisted that race did not play a part in their decision. There was more than enough evidence to make Simpson pay, they insisted.

“It was 100% for me. I really believed Mr. Simpson was guilty,” said a 55-year-old white woman from Van Nuys. “And it had nothing to do with the color of Mr. Simpson’s skin.”

Said a 40-year-old white woman who lives near Beverly Hills: “What I needed to be able to walk out of that room was [to find liability] not just beyond a reasonable doubt, but beyond a shadow of a doubt. I was willing to stay there a month if that’s what it took to be able to answer all of those questions for myself.”

The jury members said their task was sobering and difficult, that they spent more than two days just going over all the exhibits and testimony before beginning the heart of their arguments.

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Simpson did severe damage to his own cause, they said, by giving inconsistent or vague answers on crucial questions, such as the cuts on his hands.

“First he said he received those cuts from roughhousing with his young son and then he said he was cut while he was in the hotel room in Chicago,” said the Van Nuys panelist, whose son works for the Los Angeles Police Department.

Said a 36-year-old white man from Playa del Rey who was foreman for the second phase of the trial: “He was just so definite on some things and on others he avoided the question. I just did have problems with his credibility.”

A 30-year-old white man from Westchester said that the dozens of photos of Simpson wearing Bruno Magli shoes were crucial. “That was a piece of evidence that I found overwhelming,” he said. Later, he offered perhaps the most withering critique on Simpson’s courtroom performance: “I thought Kato Kaelin was more credible.”

The jurors said they were careful to weigh all of the evidence and to consider the possibility that the police could have tried to frame Simpson.

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But the 40-year-old woman said that she was left grasping for solid facts when the defense suggested that there was another killer or that former Det. Mark Fuhrman could have planted a bloody glove at Simpson’s home.

“I just could not follow it,” the woman said. She felt that defense attorneys “wanted me to infer certain things, but I felt I was getting into the area of speculation and we were ordered not to do that. I felt like we needed further evidence.”

Instead, jurors said they proceeded to pore over more than 3,000 exhibits and more than three months of testimony. It took more than two days just to go through all the evidence, before they even settled into the serious business of staking out opinions.

That laborious process meant that the panel was not set back seriously when 2 1/2 days into deliberations a juror was removed for failing to state that her daughter worked for the district attorney’s office, they said.

When jurors finally did take their first straw vote, they found that they were already unanimous about Simpson’s culpability. Allan Park, the limousine driver who waited for an extended time to drive Simpson to the airport, provided crucial testimony to prove that Simpson had time to commit the murders, said the juror from Playa del Rey. “He filled in a lot of what we needed,” the juror said.

The jurors said they became a cohesive unit not long into the trial and, like jurors in Simpson’s criminal trial, they came to detest the constant stares from the media and other courtroom onlookers.

“I think we all got fed up getting stared at,” said one of the three alternate jurors who attended the press conference. “We decided, ‘We’re not going to make any expressions and show what we are thinking about,’ ” he said. “It is just not fair.”

That composure, though, cracked at times during the 3 1/2-month ordeal. A young woman juror from Sherman Oaks explained why she was so moved when a videotape was played of victim Ronald Lyle Goldman’s bar mitzvah.

“Me and Ron are the same age,” said the 25-year-old white woman. “If that were to ever happen to one of my friends . . . it would have been completely devastating. I tired to put myself into Mr. Goldman’s shoes and it was completely overwhelming.”

The young woman said that she and other panelists were not convinced that Simpson was broke and that he could not pay for his action. “We didn’t feel he was washed up at all,” she said, adding that he could make money “with book deals, videos, whatever.”

When it came time to discuss just how much Simpson should pay, the numbers jumped up immediately, with the 40-year-old juror suggesting a formula that she hoped would begin to measure the suffering of Fred Goldman, the father of the murder victim.

She suggested to other jurors that 10 people could be paid $100,000 a year, a total of $1 million, “to come to your house and give you unconditional love, solace and understanding . . . every day.” She then figured that Goldman would live for another 24 years. She proposed a $24-million compensatory award. Eventually, her colleagues winnowed that down to $8.5 million.

While the jurors who made the decisions were universal in holding Simpson liable and only one or two disagreed about awarding punitive damages, the black woman alternate juror made it clear that the feeling that race pervaded the case was not entirely dead, even for a Santa Monica jury.

She said the lawyers for the plaintiffs were “more like bullies than professionals” and that they had played the race card to the mostly white jury. She insisted that the cuts on Simpson’s hands could not have been made by Nicole Brown Simpson because acrylic nails would break off. She insisted that there were “a lot of inconsistencies” and that “one person could not have done this by himself.”

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The juror from Westchester insisted that race did not play any part in the case. “Anybody who comments on something like that without knowing what we went through is a racist themselves,” he said. “They are just basing something on the color of our skin and that is not right.”

The jurors insisted that they took no joy in their findings and that they recognized the tragedy of Simpson’s fall.

“To find someone guilty, let alone someone like Mr. Simpson,” was very difficult for the jury, said one of the alternates. “This is not a happy day. It is really not.”

The foreman in the first phase of deliberations said during an interview at his home: “There is a sense of sadness. Mr. Simpson, I feel, was a genuine hero to all of us. . . . We found that we had a hero with feet of clay.”

Times staff writers Matt Lait, Eric Lichtblau and Eric Malnic contributed to this story.