Word: juror
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...courtroom of Judge William E. Spain, accepted the deal. The jury, which had sent word of a verdict, was kept waiting while Spain approved the new plea. After Seigler was led away, the judge invited the jury into the room and informed them of the guilty plea. One juror slumped in a chair, while several others just moaned. What was the matter? The jurors had already reached a verdict: not guilty...
That role was always on his list of personal favorites, along with Mister Roberts, of course, the thoughtful juror in 12 Angry Men and the troubled cowpoke who fails to stop a lynching in The Ox-Bow Incident. All were projections of a humane, decent and liberal-minded man trying to do the right thing in a world that often thought wrong and behaved worse. But there was another side to him. He said once that although he did not consider himself neurotic, "you become an actor maybe because there are these complexes about you that aren't average...
Last April before the trial began, the federal prosecutor warned that the jurors in the case would "become celebrities of a sort." And after they decided that John Hinckley was not guilty by reason of insanity,* the twelve Washington men and women were indeed pinioned in the spotlight of press attention. Reporters and TV crews were waiting when they arrived home. Several found the coverage so noisome that they temporarily moved out. Two others took the opportunity to complain publicly that they had been pressured into agreeing to the verdict. Eager journalists flew one of them to New York City...
...vowing to keep mum may not stop the harassment. Local papers will often assign a team of four or five reporters to badger jurors in the first days after a trial. Says the New York Post's combative Steve Dunleavy: "I love to get inside a juror's head." Anthea Frankl sat on the White Plains, N.Y., murder trial growing out of the Stouffer's Inn fire that killed 26 business executives. She saw so many newspeople that she began to rate them, from the New York Times ("totally ethical") to a local Westchester County, N.Y., paper...
...Jurors sometimes have their own reasons for talking. Money is one. When journalists declined to pay a fee to one Hinckley juror, her husband complained, "Why should she spend her time so you can make money on her? What's in it for her?" Another motivation for telling their stories is to fight back. When the judge in the Stouffer's Inn case threw out the jury's conviction, the next day's newspapers were filled with disgruntled reactions from jurors defending their verdict...