Law Book Throws McDougal Trial Into Turmoil

The threat of a mistrial threw the Susan McDougal contempt case into turmoil for six hours Friday and temporarily halted deliberations after it was discovered that a juror had improperly brought a legal code book into the jury room.

The judge was worried that the process may have become irreparably tainted, but, to the surprise of prosecutors, he decided to keep the offending juror on the panel and allow deliberations to resume Monday.

The latest unorthodox episode in the high-profile Whitewater case turned bizarre when it was learned that the law book once had belonged to a controversial former state Supreme Court justice who is an outspoken critic of independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr. That triggered concerns among prosecutors of possible jury tampering.

But after interviews with the former justice and the juror, U.S. District Judge George Howard Jr. said he was satisfied that there was an innocent explanation. The juror, truck driver Michael Nance, had bought former justice John I. Purtle’s Little Rock house in 1997 and found the code book in a back closet.

Nance’s “sole purpose” for bringing in the book, the judge said, had been to gain understanding of key legal terms in the case.

Defense attorney Mark Geragos was pleased that the judge allowed the jury to stay intact, especially in light of signs that the panel might be leaning McDougal’s way. In the end, Geragos said, the roller-coaster day was “much ado about nothing.”

He said that the prosecutors’ suggestions of jury tampering and conspiracy theories reflected an “institutional paranoia” by Starr’s office, which he has accused of harassing his client.

“Only some Yankee could come down here and start coming up with this fanciful theory” linking Purtle to the jury’s deliberations, said Geragos, who is from Los Angeles.

Prosecutors grudgingly accepted Howard’s decision.

“First impression, based on what we heard, Mr. Nance should have been excused,” said W. Hickman Ewing Jr., head of Starr’s Arkansas office. “He isn’t supposed to be getting the law from anywhere but Judge Howard.”

But, Ewing said in an interview, “that’s the jury we’ve got. We’re not criticizing the judge.”

The episode began when Howard’s clerk received word via a bailiff that one of the jurors might have brought a legal book into the jury room. The clerk went into the jury room and discovered the book--”Arkansas Code of 1997 Annotated”--under a piece of paper.

As the clerk later told the judge, the jurors said they had talked about consulting the book in their deliberations but had decided not to do so.

One passage in the book was highlighted. Although it concerned state law, not federal as in the McDougal case, it dealt with an issue central to the jurors’ discussions the last two days: the instructions jurors receive on legal terminology.

On Thursday, their first day of deliberations, the jurors sent Judge Howard three notes--all asking about legal terminology regarding possible defenses for McDougal’s contempt charge, including the defendant’s state of mind and an “innocent reason” for defying a court order.

But Howard, instead of answering the questions, simply referred them to his earlier instructions.

Geragos saw those notes as a sign that jurors were seriously exploring rationales for acquitting McDougal. A one-time business partner to then-Gov. Clinton and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, McDougal is charged with contempt and obstruction for refusing to cooperate with a grand jury investigating the Whitewater real estate development that was owned by the Clintons and McDougal and her late former husband.

The disclosure of the book stunned all parties in the case, who hurriedly met in the judge’s chambers. Howard’s first order of business was to suspend the jury’s deliberations--an attempt, said prosecutor Mark Barrett, to “stop any hemorhaging that might be occurring right now.”

Howard said it was the first time in his 19 years on the bench that he had seen such a situation. Barrett said: “I can’t see how this juror can’t be excused. . . . It’s very serious.”

The concern, all parties agreed, was whether “extraneous information” from outside the control of the court had improperly influenced the deliberative process of the 12 jurors. Howard and the attorneys discussed a variety of options--everything from declaring a mistrial to removing Nance and allowing the remaining 11 jurors to proceed, as is allowed under federal law. The options were complicated by the fact that Howard excused all three alternate jurors on Wednesday.

Geragos told the judge that, were he to remove Nance, “we’ve forever tainted this jury.”

But Barrett insisted that Nance be removed--especially because of the juror’s possible connection to Purtle, a controversial figure in Arkansas legal circles, both for his politics and his personal history.

Purtle was acquitted in 1986 in connection with an alleged arson-for-profit scheme and later resigned his seat on the state’s high court. He was a vocal critic of Starr’s operation and in 1982, as Barrett noted, Purtle voted to allow McDougal and her then-husband to open a new branch of a bank they had bought.

“If there’s the possibility of jury tampering going on here, we’ve got to root it out,” Barrett said.

Howard was concerned as well. “We want to make sure that people still have confidence in the federal justice system,” he said.

Finally, the judge subpoenaed Purtle to appear. Purtle acknowledged that the book had belonged to him, saying that he must have left it in the house he sold to Nance in late 1997. But he said he had not spoken to Nance recently and had never discussed any legal matters with him.

Times staff writer Robert L. Jackson in Washington contributed to this story.