Word: juror
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...jurors claimed that there were no racial elements in their decision and that no one should read such implications into it. "We were doing nothing more than what we were charged by the judge to do," said Juror Diana Serpe. "We weren't trying to send a message to the public...
...number of New York State legal experts said Merola and his assistant Bookin simply failed to substantiate their charges. Says Columbia University Law Professor Gerard Lynch: "The general feeling is that this is one of the dullest, longest and least persuasive presentations ever made." Joy Fennel, a juror who says she once leaned toward conviction, agrees: "I was frustrated the D.A. didn't do a better job." Several jurors also indicated sympathy with a defense contention that Merola, a Democrat, brought the charges just before the 1984 election in a politically motivated attempt to embarrass the Reagan Administration. Countered Merola...
...prosecution's efforts were further damaged, perhaps fatally, in April when Judge John Collins felt it necessary to clarify for Merola the legal theory on which the case would be presented. Merola wanted to broach two theories of what the jurors could consider to be larceny; Collins allowed them to weigh only one. Says a retired Manhattan judge who followed the trial: "It is pretty embarrassing for the prosecutor to have the judge straighten out for him the indictment and the legal theory behind it." The sensation of what was primarily a dozy trial came just after the jury began...
...zealously defend their clients, forbids degrading courtroom accusations only if they are also irrelevant. Formal discipline by the bar for violations is apparently rare. In essence, the dividing line between zealousness and callousness is left to a lawyer's discretion -- and his sense that such tactics might backfire, creating juror hostility toward his client...
...Central America. To bolster the cause, Defense Attorney Leonard Weinglass, one of Hoffman's lawyers in the 1969 Chicago Seven trial, got testimony from former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and onetime Contra Leader Edgar Chamorro. "These young people are doing perhaps what most of us should be doing," Juror Anne Gaffney, 64, said afterward...