Exxon Claims Oil Spill Jury Tainted

A federal appeals court will hear arguments Monday that the jury that awarded more than $5 billion in damages in the Exxon Valdez oil spill was tainted by a bailiff who pulled out his gun and joked about putting a holdout juror “out of her misery.”

The same juror, who attempted suicide three weeks after the verdict, alleged she was threatened by other jurors and by the bailiff, who was forced to resign from the U.S. Marshals Service after admitting he had offered his gun and a bullet to one of the jurors and had improperly socialized with the jury.

The appeal sheds light on the deliberations that produced the largest punitive damage award in U.S. history, revealing a jury plagued by loud arguments, tearful outbursts and a nagging fear that it was unequipped to resolve the complex economic and scientific dilemmas arising from the disastrous 1989 tanker accident that spilled 11 million gallons of oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound.

Two jurors found dead fish on their lawns after the August 1994 award of $287 million in compensatory damages, court papers show. Another juror suffered angina pains and got a doctor’s letter recommending she be excused from the tense deliberations.

The oral arguments are scheduled before the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, and the stakes for Exxon are high. The firm is seeking to overturn a total of $5.3 billion in compensatory and punitive damages due to be paid to tens of thousands of fishermen, landowners, business owners and tribal natives who live and work around Prince William Sound.

The verdict “was tainted by coercion of the jury on the part of a rogue court security officer,” Exxon lawyers argued in their appeal, which challenges the verdict on a variety of legal grounds.

“He intruded into the jury’s deliberative process, brandished firearms at jurors, took sides in the deliberations and committed perjury to conceal his misconduct,” the firm’s lawyers contend.

Bailiff’s Actions Dismissed as Harmless

U.S. District Judge H. Russel Holland, the trial judge in Anchorage, found the bailiff’s actions had no effect on the deliberations and said he did not find juror Rita Wilson to be credible when she raised allegations about a series of threats supposedly lodged against her when she held out against awarding punitive damages.

The chief lawyer for the plaintiffs, Brian O’Neill, dismissed the bailiff’s actions as a harmless joke and pointed out that Wilson, a former Anchorage school library aide, did not claim she was threatened until long after the trial.

“She claimed . . . she received 30 to 50 other death threats after the trial, that persons in automobiles were photographing her and might shoot her, that eight or nine jurors wanted her dead, including cutting her up in little pieces and flushing her down the toilet, raping her,” O’Neill said of Wilson’s testimony in Holland’s chambers.

“The judge didn’t believe her, and that’s a decision that the judge is supposed to make,” O’Neill said. “Otherwise, every time we had a juror who . . . wanted to come back and take a sideswipe at the other jurors, we’d never have finality.”

In extensive interviews with The Times, jurors denied Wilson was ever threatened but admitted they had sought to have her removed from the case after she refused to consider awarding punitive damages, repeatedly ran crying from the room and demonstrated what they saw as emotional instability.

“I am confident in the process, that it worked, and that all of us . . . gave it our best judgment,” foreman Kenneth Murray said. “As far as the allegations [about threats] that she made later, like the judge said: I think she believes what she believes, and I don’t believe any of the rest of us believe any of it.”

Juror Doug Graham said he is convinced that Wilson concurred with the $5-billion punitive damage award. “At that moment, yes,” he said. “There were people in the room that were asking her, ‘Are you sure?’ And she was.”

It was Graham who told the court that he had been approached midway through the deliberations by bailiff Don Warrick, whom several of the jurors believed to be prying or a potential “plant.”

Warrick had shown up by invitation at a weekend barbecue given by one of the jurors and went to the home of another juror to talk about a mutual interest in gold mining, all while deliberations were ongoing.

Although the bailiff did not discuss the Valdez case, a Marshals Service deputy who investigated the case told the court he considered it potentially conduct of “a criminal nature” and added: “It is very, very out of character for anybody that is remotely connected to the U.S. marshals office to associate with jury members. . . . I can’t get into my mind why this guy did this.”

Several jurors said they felt uncomfortable about the number of questions Warrick was asking. Graham told the court that he went out of his way to avoid the bailiff, who on one occasion, Graham said, flagged him over and began talking about Wilson.

“He said something about, you know, you guys, you’re really having problems with her. . . . Pulled his gun out, took a bullet out of it and said, ‘Maybe if you put her out of her misery’ or something,” Graham testified.

Warrick at first denied any knowledge of the incident, calling the allegation “absurd.” On that basis, Holland denied Exxon’s motion for a new trial.

Exxon later learned that the Marshals Service had conducted its own investigation--one in which Graham passed a polygraph test and Warrick’s results were inconclusive. Based on that, Warrick admitted everything, insisting it was intended as a joke, and was asked to resign. Not long after, he suffered a heart attack while driving, crashed into a tree and died.

Only then did Wilson come forward, in March of last year, with new allegations, saying Warrick had threatened her. She testified in a closed session that the bailiff told her: “I could be shot, accidentally, with a throw-away gun on break and wouldn’t be able to prove who did it. Or one of the jurors could just accidentally get in the deliberation room with a gun. . . . He told me that he could kill me and no one would know . . . and the other jurors would back him up.”

Wilson also told the judge that one of her fellow jurors, Bruce Dean, warned her about opposing the verdict just as the jury was about to file into the courtroom with its $5-billion punitive damage award. She said Dean “told me that my daughters were very good-looking, and to think about that when I gave my vote.”

The judge and the plaintiffs’ lawyers expressed skepticism about those claims, particularly given Wilson’s demeanor while she was testifying: trembling violently and sobbing, even before questioning reached sensitive issues.

She contradicted herself and often seemed confused, the judge concluded in finding her testimony “bizarre” and “not credible.”

But Exxon lawyers say her testimony should not be discounted. “If her account is not at least roughly accurate, what accounts for her suicide attempt . . . and why would Mrs. Wilson tell such a story if it were not true?” Los Angeles attorney John Daum argued in a brief.

“In a case where a class of plaintiffs representing 10% of the population of Alaska was seeking huge sums of money, a juror who prevented such a windfall might well fear for her personal safety,” Daum argued.

When contacted, Wilson broke down in tears. Her husband, Jerry, who has frequently spoken for her during the case, said he believes his wife but did not want to go into detail about the purported threats.

“This is five years later, and it still has a great personal impact on our lives,” he said.

The purported threats by other jurors “may have been said in jest or other things, but you have to know my wife’s personality to know that would not be the way they were received,” he said. “My wife is an extremely honest and sincere person, and I don’t believe she remembered it wrong, no.”

No other juror interviewed could remember a single threat being made against Wilson, even in jest. They said, to the contrary, the jury spent much of its time in several weeks of deliberations trying to calm and accommodate Wilson, who repeatedly rushed to the bathroom in tears.

Wilson, in the first phase of deliberations, was reluctant to find Exxon or tanker Capt. Joseph Hazelwood guilty of negligence, jurors said.

Later, she expressed adamant opposition to the concept of punitive damages, they said, and refused to engage in meaningful discussions on the issue.

Clearly, the 4 1/2-month trial, covering more than 4,000 pieces of evidence and more than 150 witnesses, proved difficult for all the jurors.

Several of them went into deliberations expressing doubt that 12 ordinary citizens could resolve difficult issues about falling salmon prices and complex biological effects when dozens of lawyers, scientists and economists could not agree.

“We basically retried the whole trial, just trying to make sense of it,” said Jewell Spann, a McDonald’s manager and former Californian who lives in Kenai.

After settling on an amount for compensatory damages, the jury turned to the more difficult question of punitive damages.

After announcing her belief that Exxon had been punished enough by paying out more than $3.5 billion in cleanup and settlement costs, Wilson refused to budge and became more and more emotional, fellow jurors said.

Not that other jurors were in harmony. Proposed figures for punitive damages ranged from zero to $20 billion, and for days on end, the two sides failed to move closer. But Wilson, the jurors said, didn’t even want to consider punitive damages.

“Daily, she just seemed to kind of disintegrate. It kind of shocked us,” Spann said.

At one point, the jury sent a note to the judge, questioning Wilson’s emotional ability to continue. The judge called her in, and Wilson assured him that she wanted to go on, that her voice needed to be heard. Based on that, he sent her back. When Wilson asked an hour later to be excused, the judge told her there was nothing he could do.

At some point, jurors said, Wilson seemed to give up, telling the rest of the jurors, “I don’t want to fight anymore.” The rest of the jury insisted that they didn’t want her to give in; they wanted her to agree.

Still, there were other holdouts, jurors who resisted the $5-billion figure the rest of the jury was converging on, an amount roughly equal to Exxon’s profits in a year. Finally, all agreed on the figure.

When the judge polled each juror on whether they concurred with the verdict, several said they held their breath.

Wilson assented, and the judge upheld the jury verdict.