Abrams’ Jurors: Mental Health System Is Ailing

Neither woman wanted to serve on the jury. From the outset, the trial promised nothing but horror and sadness, and a wrenching final decision that neither wanted to confront.

When Joanne Reynolds heard she would sit in judgment of Steven Allen Abrams, charged with murder after driving his car into a Costa Mesa preschool playground in 1999 and killing two toddlers, she had this thought:

Please, any trial but this one.

For Sally White, Abrams’ jury duty meant time away from the fifth-grade class she taught in Laguna Niguel and her spot on the school district negotiations team.

Reynolds and White joined 10 other Orange County citizens who, after finding Abrams legally sane in October, spared him the death penalty and recommended life imprisonment.

That was 11 days ago. Wrung out by the experience, neither White nor Reynolds had planned to talk publicly about the trial, during which Abrams’ attorneys claimed that killing innocent children was his way of thwarting brain messages that instructed him to kill bad people.

They also watched two videotapes of Abrams--one taken right after the preschool incident and another from a court appearance in 1994. In both instances, they said, he appeared mentally unstable.

White said there were nights after testimony that she would cry on the drive back to South County. Reynolds came to realize the trial was a “transcendent” experience that she’s still sorting out.

However, feeling that some business has been left undone, they agreed last week to discuss what had become an unforgettable jury experience marked by conflicting thoughts and emotions.

The unfinished business, Reynolds said, is to plead that the county find a better way to deal with the mentally ill. While speaking for themselves, the two jurors said they feel they can speak in general for the jury of 10 women and two men, which they describe as uncommonly close-knit, serious and collegial.

In separate trial phases, the jury first found Abrams guilty, then legally sane. But by the start of the third phase, when jurors would be deciding a penalty of life or death, they apparently had arrived at private decisions that Abrams was mentally ill and shouldn’t be executed.

The System, as Well as the Defendant, on Trial

The first straw vote on punishment was 11-1 for life imprisonment. The lone proponent for execution was a young woman who made her case, then listened as other jurors explained why they favored imprisonment.

The prevailing notion, Reynolds and White said, was captured in defense attorney Denise Gragg’s argument that Abrams was a sick man, not an evil one. Jurors discounted the prosecutors’ contention that Abrams’ drug use caused his psychotic behavior.

By the time they agreed to spare Abrams’ life, jurors had, in effect, put the mental health system on trial during deliberations.

“Actually, from the beginning of the sanity phase, it was hard for us to come away with respect for the whole mental health field,” said White, who turned 50 during the 2 1/2-month trial. “You have to give it some blame for allowing him to slip through in such a way.”

Reynolds, a 52-year-old real estate developer from Newport Beach and the jury forewoman, said, “From the minute we sat down [in the sanity phase], we’d almost have preferred to try the mental health system and not the individual.” Her notes reflect that at least 16 county employees--either at the jail or the mental health department--had dealings with Abrams beginning in late 1993, when his psychotic behavior began manifesting itself.

It’s not that the jurors emerged from the trial with a 10-point plan for improving the system. Rather, Reynolds said, it was more a sad lament for its inadequacies.

“I sort of assumed there was a system out there, and no matter how imperfect, it works,” Reynolds said. “What this revealed to me is that there is a system out there that barely functions.”

Jurors were amazed to learn that although various mental health and law enforcement professionals concluded Abrams showed psychotic behavior, there was no coordinated effort to treat him.

Even in making their critique, the women acknowledge the complicated nature of mental health treatment. Both know of other people who suffer a degree of mental illness. Both know that mentally ill people are often difficult to convince that they have a problem, and that family members need to help--something not readily present in Abrams’ case.

“I can hear bureaucrats answering already,” Reynolds said. “That we’ve got so many people and all these rules and regulations and blah, blah, blah. Well, get your head out of the sand. Look at these people when they come through and do something with them. We can’t help but feel somehow, some way, somewhere, he [Abrams] could have stuck in the system better than he did.”

Instead, records indicate Abrams had two brief encounters with the system, receiving very little treatment on either occasion.

The jury found Abrams sane, they said, because of the strict legal definition. Part of the standard is the ability to distinguish right from wrong, and jurors felt Abrams understood what he was doing was wrong, they said.

Swirl of Emotions Encompasses Finding

Still, White said she knew by the end of the guilt phase that she couldn’t vote to execute Abrams. Reynolds struggled a bit longer and was certain after Gragg’s closing argument. They quoted another juror, on the eve of the punishment phase, as saying: “Oh, I really don’t want to do this.”

Through it all, they said, their increasing sadness for Abrams’ plight was more than matched by their admiration for the families of the two dead preschoolers, Brandon Wiener and Sierra Soto.

That admiration, coupled with the jurors’ highly favorable impressions of the lawyers on both sides, added another dimension to the experience.

White recalls that at the end of the trial, Pamela Wiener [Brandon’s mother] mouthed “thank you” to her. “This is after we had found for life and not death. I thought, ‘That is an amazing woman.’ ”

Since reaching their verdict Nov. 1, the women have stayed in touch with each other through a series of e-mails. The bonds formed among jurors and the trial’s reminders about the fragility of life and the importance of personal relationships have provided unexpected refuge from the inherent tragedy of the case.

Reynolds still is sifting through the experience. “I’ll never be without it--the pathos, especially,” she said of the trial’s memories. “But at the end of the day, I still feel this was the inevitable thing to do, the right thing to do.”

White wants to take it a step further.

“You want some redemption here,” she said. “We have all this money for AIDS walks and for breast cancer, and these are wonderful causes, but because of the stigma of mental health, you don’t have a bunch of family members coming forward wanting to walk for schizophrenia.

“And there needs to be some public awareness that something needs to be done for these people.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com