Jurors Were Swayed Beyond a Doubt

The jurors that reached a $33.5-million verdict against O.J. Simpson spoke powerfully and with seeming unanimity in the hours after their final judgment was announced Monday: They did not believe O.J. Simpson.

They said they also felt the pain of the families of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman. But they disdained the defense’s theories of police conspiracy. And they wanted Simpson to pay--for the rest of his life.

That message emerged from a news conference and subsequent interviews with many of the six men and six women who decided that Simpson should pay $33.5 million for killing his ex-wife and her friend.

At least five of the panelists, some who asked not to be 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 sixth juror said she believed in Simpson’s complicity, but perhaps not beyond a reasonable doubt.

“Once we felt that he wasn’t telling the truth, it was downhill from there,” Jack Herlihy, a white carpenter from Mar Vista who served as foreman before the punitive damages phase of deliberations, said in an interview.

Orville Bigelow, 30, a flight attendant from Westchester and who is white, said the jury had no doubts about Simpson’s guilt. “If I had to do 100% without doubt, I’d say yes, because of the evidence.”

The panelists depicted a thoughtful and studious 30 hours of deliberation after more than 4 1/2 months of testimony. They said they had been careful to examine the defenses theories, to weigh the amount of the damages carefully. And--though they reached a strikingly different conclusion than the jury that found Simpson not guilty of murder 16 months ago--they carefully declined to criticize that panel’s ruling.

By appearing together on television after their verdict was announced, the jurors provided an unusual glimpse into their decision-making process. Insights into the group dynamic had been more elusive in the aftermath of the criminal trial; in that case, jurors did not hold a news conference after their verdict and in many cases avoided in-depth interviews.

“What I’ve learned from this is that the death of two people, two human beings, it really affects everybody,” said a 25-year-old white woman from Sherman Oaks. “The punitive damages that we awarded is a deterrent for other murders, not just Mr. Simpson. So this really has a global effect, I think.”

The jury members described a task that was both sobering and difficult. They spent more than two days just going over all the exhibits and testimony before beginning to debate the evidence in detail. When they came to a point of contention, they would go slowly around the table, until all 12 had agreed, said Stephen Strati, 35, who took over as foreman when the jury moved to assess punitive damages.

“We went over everything. It wasn’t just one piece of evidence. It was everything together,” said Strati, a white man who manages a museum gift shop. “We were very methodical.”

Loyola Law School professor Laurie Levenson said the extended deliberations bolster the credibility of the jury’s verdict.

“What perhaps caused the greatest resentment after the [criminal] case was the quick verdict,” said Levenson, referring to the less than three hours jurors took to find Simpson not guilty. “This jury took their time, scoured the evidence and came out ready to explain their verdict.”

Among the most damaging evidence against Simpson, many of the jurors agreed, was his own vague and inconsistent performance on the stand.

“He would change his mind,” said a 55-year-old white woman from Van Nuys. “First he said he cut his fingers--which were obvious fingernail gouges from the attacks--he said he received those from roughhousing with his young son, and then later . . . he changed his mind and said he cut his hand when he was in Chicago in the hotel room.”

Bigelow said Simpson would have been more credible had he been more willing to admit some of the evidence and some of his own failures.

“I would have respected him more if he said, ‘Yes, I own the shoes but it doesn’t mean I’m a murderer,’ ” said Bigelow, standing in the doorway of his apartment. “Or the fact that he abused his wife and denied it. [It would have been better] if he had just said, ‘Yes, I abused her, but that doesn’t make me a murderer.’ Nobody says a murderer has to wear gloves that fit, Now shoes that fit . . . “

Herlihy said the bottom line for him “was the testimony regarding his beating his ex-wife. We had two witnesses who testified that they had seen it,” Herlihy said. “Once he said that [he had never beaten her], I felt that he was lying.”

Earlier Bigelow had offered perhaps the most withering critique on Simpson’s courtroom performance: “I thought Kato Kaelin was more credible.”

Juror Laura Fast Khazee, speaking on “Larry King Live,” said she had an even more visceral reaction to Simpson. “O.J. insulted us on the stand,” said the 27-year-old white Brentwood woman. “He insulted our intelligences. He looked us in the eye and said I did not kill Nicole. He said he never hit Nicole. It was sickening.”

Despite their misgivings with the defendant, jurors said they took pains to give Simpson’s defense a fair hearing, weighing the possibility that the police could have tried to frame the former football star.

But a 40-year-old white stage manager from Los Angeles said she was left grasping for hard proof when the defense suggested that there was another killer or that 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 like we needed further evidence.”

Bigelow said the picture of a Los Angeles Police Department that simultaneously bumbled and conspired just didn’t fly.

“They called them incompetent,” Bigelow said. “How could incompetent people plant all of this? It doesn’t make sense.”

When they finally received the case, jury members said, they proceeded with a certain collegiality and calm that followed from months of togetherness. Jurors built an esprit de corps over lunch-hour games of bingo, Yahtzee and Pictionary and watching videos like “ET” and “Grease,” Strati said.

They had long since agreed that they did not like the inquiring stares from reporters and other onlookers. So they had resolved to maintain poker faces in the courtroom.

“We talked to each other, we learned about each other as people,” Strati said. “All the evidence was calmly discussed. We went around the room in an ordered fashion and we kept going to each person until we closed the issue.”

The jurors proceeded methodically through more than 3,000 exhibits and more than three months of testimony. The laborious process suffered only a minor setback, the panelists agreed, when one of their panel was removed 2 1/2 days into deliberations. The woman, the only African American on the panel, had failed to state that her daughter worked for the district attorney’s office. But jurors said they had not yet gotten to the heart of their work and they were only briefly distracted.

Following Judge Hiroshi Fujisaki’s instruction, the jurors did not immediately stake out their positions. When they finally canvassed the room after a few days, it became obvious that they agreed Simpson was the killer.

The photos of Simpson wearing Bruno Magli shoes months before the slayings was enough for Bigelow. Strati said limousine driver Allan Park provided crucial testimony to prove that Simpson had time to commit the murders. “He filled in a lot of what we needed,” Strati said.

Unlike some members of the criminal trial jury, their counterparts in Santa Monica had, by the end of 41 days of testimony, come to identify closely with the families of the victims.

The young white juror from Sherman Oaks said she was overcome by sadness and empathy when the jury was shown a videotape of Ron Goldman’s bar mitzvah.

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

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

When the jurors turned to discuss compensatory damages for the Goldman family, the ante was raised immediately by the 40-year-old stage manager. She said that she began the deliberations by suggesting an unusual formula.

She reasoned that Goldman’s father, Fred, should receive $1 million a year, enough to pay 10 people $100,000 a year “to come to your house and give you unconditional love, solace and understanding . . . every day.” She then figured that Goldman, 54, would live for another 24 years. That came to a $24-million compensatory award.

Eventually, her colleagues winnowed that down to $8.5 million.

Some trial-watchers expressed surprise that the jury had chosen a second foreman when it turned to the discussion of punitive damages. But the jurors said that decision was also reached by consensus. They simply thought it might be wise to turn to a leader with a mind for money and decided on Strati.

“We felt that he would be a better moderator of that phase of the discussion,” Herlihy said.

In the end, the jurors decided that Simpson should pay dearly for his crime. “We came to the conclusion that Mr. Simpson should not profit from these murders,” Strati said.

The feeling of solidarity that pervaded the post-trial news conference was not universal, however. A black woman who was an alternate made it clear that the racial divisions that have clouded the case since its inception 32 months ago are far from buried, 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 also saw “a lot of inconsistencies” in the case and concluded: “One person could not have done this by himself.”

The other jurors did not directly contest those comments, or the woman’s suggestion that blacks might have been excluded intentionally from the group that finally heard the case.

But they insisted that race was not a factor in their deliberations and were resentful that, just minutes after they were discharged, the issue was already being raised as an overriding theme.

“I hated that,” Bigelow said. “Because of my decision, people are going to say I made my decision because I’m white. It doesn’t take the color of your skin to commit a crime. Simpson is just a man, and men kill. Black or white, celebrity or not.”

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

“There is a sense of sadness,” Herlihy said. “Mr. Simpson was a genuine hero to all of us. . . . We find that we’ve got a hero with feet of clay.”