NEWS ANALYSIS : Experts Say Simpson Jury Will Be Careful, Thorough : Deliberations: Length of the case causes cohesiveness and a desire to reach ‘finish line,’ observers predict.

It’s Monday morning.

One year and six days ago, you turned up for jury duty and--without realizing quite what was happening--checked your real life at the door. You’re a juror in O.J. Simpson’s double murder case and, now, “the Trial of the Century” is in your lap.

So how do you do it?

You have listened for months. You have taken notes that even you may no longer be able to read. You have been cajoled, enjoined, admonished, challenged, flattered and implored by professional persuaders and a benevolent dictator in a black robe. Now, you and 11 colleagues are alone with 1,105 pieces of evidence. If your recollection of any of the 133 witnesses flags, you can simply ask for a reading from any of the 45,000 pages of trial transcript.

But, in the end, on what do you rely? Whose word do you trust? How do you treat one another?

One of the many paradoxes of the Simpson case is that even though its jury has been sequestered longer and more securely than any panel in California history, we know more about the individual jurors and their predilections than any other sitting jury in history. The transcripts of Judge Lance A. Ito’s extraordinary series of inquiries into the allegations that led to the dismissal of 10 jurors provide an unprecedented window into the personalities and attitudes of those who remain.

They also provide legal analysts with a basis for some unusually informed speculation about how the Simpson jury may proceed when it begins deliberating Monday.

“Every jury approaches its deliberations differently,” said defense attorney Gerald L. Chaleff, who was lead counsel in the Hillside Strangler case, the second-longest criminal trial in California history. “I once had a jury that spent 17 days carefully discussing the evidence before they ever took on a vote on the defendant’s guilt or innocence. Other juries go back and immediately take a straw poll on the question.

“Once they begin to deliberate, every jury functions differently,” Chaleff said. “Some juries are like loose-knit informal groups in which everybody talks without strong leadership and others have forepersons who are dictators and strictly control the discussions.

“Some juries will go through the witnesses one at a time and some just adopt a free-form approach, skipping from one person to another with items of physical evidence thrown in between,” Chaleff said. “Some spend the first two or three days in the jury room just fighting with each other. In the second Rodney King trial, that’s exactly what happened.”

Chaleff said, however, that he does not think that conduct will be repeated in the deliberations over Simpson’s fate. “I think this group may be more cohesive than most, not only because they have been sequestered together for all these months, but also because the various investigations already have purged the panel of its most disruptive members.”

Poring Over Jury Instructions

One nationally known authority on juror behavior, Lois Haney of the Oakland-based National Jury Project, said she “suspects these jurors will spend some time poring over their very complex written jury instructions. They’ll try to reach a real understanding of what reasonable doubt is. They’ll want to establish what the distinction is between first- and second-degree murder, an elusive distinction even to professionals.

“At the National Jury Project, we’ve interviewed many thousands of jurors over the past 20 years and we’ve learned that, once they’ve done those things, there basically are two ways juries proceed: One sort of jury sits down and takes a straw ballot in the first day or so. Essentially, they’re saying, ‘Let’s just see how close we are to some agreement.’

“Others take a very different approach, and heed the instruction that early voting and strong statements at the outset can impede their deliberations,” Haney said.

“As a result, there are deliberations that are very much vote- and verdict-focused and there are deliberations that are much more evidence-driven. We’ve found that the latter often take only a single vote at the end of their deliberations. Characteristically, they go through as much of the evidence as they can and then vote, typically when the foreperson has a sense that there’s consensus in the room.”

Haney said she believes that the Simpson jurors also “may want to talk a while simply out of an enormous sense of relief that they now are legally empowered to discuss what Ito has ordered them not to talk about for nearly nine months, despite the fact they that they’ve virtually cohabitated. They know each other very well by now and probably have a lot to say to each other.

“At this point,” Haney said, “I’m willing to speculate that this group will be patient and evidence-driven. They clearly take their jobs very seriously and, I think, would like to put this case to bed one way or another. They’ve invested an enormous amount of their time in this trial, and they won’t want to squander that investment. They’ll listen to each other and I don’t think they’ll hesitate to take their time. I don’t see this big hurry everybody predicts.”

Loyola Law School professor Laurie Levenson, who has followed the Simpson trial from the outset, does not see any rush to judgment. “I would think they’ll work through all the evidence and just the logistics of that will take a week, maybe two,” she said. “The speed with which they selected a foreperson [four minutes] suggests how cohesive a group they’ve become. But I think they will heed Judge Ito’s instruction against snap judgments and spend some time with the evidence.”

Houston-based jury consultant Robert B. Hirschhorn agrees. “I don’t think this will be like the William Kennedy Smith case, where they went into the jury room, picked a presiding juror, took a vote and everybody agreed ‘not guilty’ in five minutes,” said Hirschhorn, who served as a defense consultant in that case.

Rather, he predicted that the Simpson jury would proceed more along the model followed by jurors in the 1994 trial of 11 members of the Branch Davidians accused of killing four agents who raided the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms at the Davidians’ Mt. Carmel complex in Waco, Tex. In that case, Hirschhorn said, “the jury pored through the evidence to find the pearls of reasonable doubt even though there were four dead government agents. It was a six-week trial, with hundreds of pieces of evidence. The jury took four days to reach a verdict.”

All 11 defendants were acquitted of murder charges, but seven were convicted of lesser offenses.

Hirschhorn believes the Simpson deliberations will take about two weeks.

“Some jurors are going to look at 1,100 pieces of evidence. Most will concentrate on 20 to 30 pieces. A couple jurors won’t look at any and every single juror will put on the gloves,” Hirschhorn said.

“If they are inclined to convict, before they convict someone like O.J. Simpson for murder, they want to say we went through all the evidence and we didn’t find reasonable doubt. That way they can live with their consciences, live with the community and sleep well at night,” Hirschhorn said.

On the other hand, Hirschhorn said, jurors who are leaning toward acquittal “will go through the evidence to pluck out the seeds of doubt Johnnie Cochran and his colleagues planted throughout the trial. As they find a pearl, they’ll set it aside or write it down and then they’ll have a string of pearls to argue with.”

In the end, Hirschhorn believes the 10-woman, two-man panel will reach a verdict: “When you invest this kind of time, make this kind of commitment, you want to reach the finish line,” Hirschhorn said.

William Zamora of Escondido knows the feeling. Zamora was one of the jurors who was sequestered for nearly nine months before convicting Charles Manson and three women of murdering actress Sharon Tate and six other people in 1969.

“These jurors now feel important,” Zamora said Saturday. “They’re going to put themselves to work. We also worked on Saturdays. There was a monumental amount of evidence and lot of witnesses and exhibits. We categorized each thing; we looked at autopsy photos; we followed the jury instructions, but they were so confusing. A couple of times we had to go back to the judge and say, ‘Just what do you mean by this instruction?’ ”

Arguments From Attorneys

In closing arguments in the Simpson case, prosecutors and defense attorneys exhorted the jurors--nine blacks, two whites and one Latino--to do their civic duty in strikingly different ways, said Southwestern University law professor Karen Smith.

“Chris Darden did an excellent job of denouncing the ‘race card,’ telling them that a former football star should receive no special treatment, and reminding the jurors they must live up to the idea of equal justice like everyone else--they can’t just be the recipient of equal justice, they must be the dispensers of equal justice as well,” Smith said.

On the other hand, she said, Cochran urged the jurors, in effect, to draw a line in the sand against police misconduct by rendering a not guilty verdict. The defense, through Barry Scheck’s attack on the credibility of forensic evidence, also “gave the jury a scientific argument to use if they want to acquit Simpson,” Smith said.

Despite all the sound and fury of the past eight months, Brandeis political science professor Jeffrey Abramson, author of the acclaimed 1994 book “We the Jury,” wonders how much the evidence and arguments presented will affect the outcome.

“We don’t know what the jury is thinking, but for the public the trial hasn’t changed the public opinion polls a great deal. Most blacks don’t seem to have changed their views because of the DNA evidence and most whites haven’t changed their opinions because of the revelations about [former LAPD Detective] Mark Fuhrman,” Abramson said.

“The forces at work here are so rooted in the jurors’ life experiences, I can’t imagine the performance of the attorneys is changing a close vote,” Abramson said.