Word: juror
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After seven days of testimony, the nine white and three black jurors received 30 pages of instructions, which Dollar calls "intimidating," and then the real struggle began. Says Dollar of the four days that finally led to guilty verdicts for three of the defendants: "It was so tense in there it was mind-boggling. One juror, Barbara Freeman, was pounding on the table, calling those guys animals. She was hollering, 'Murder one! Murder one!' " Says Freeman, an advertising production manager: "It's a real skin stripper. You find out a lot about yourself. I came...
Reasonable enough treatment of prisoners. But these were not the defendants; they were the jurors. The trial was the prosecution of the so-called Pontiac Ten, which dragged on for nearly eight months until last May, making it one of the longest criminal trials in U.S. history. More than 1,000 potential jurors were questioned by batteries of lawyers, and each side had 120 peremptory challenges. Jury selection alone took five months, and the jurors were sequestered during the whole trial. "How would I describe the experience?" asks Juror Harry Chartrand, 64, a retired electrical worker. "In two words: Lousy...
During the quasi imprisonment, one juror missed out on a job that would have doubled his salary, one had to prepare for and take an entrance exam to graduate school, and two endured the deaths of close relatives. Conjugal visits were permitted only on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. Jeffrey Vacek, 23, a computer technician, says of the separation from his steady girlfriend, "It was hell." Because of the boredom and isolation, the jurors, like many other kinds of captives, began to develop an obsession with food. "The main thing was eating," recalls Sherman Frooman, 53, a clothing salesman. "But after...
Despite the irritations, most of the twelve jurors and six alternates accepted their fate with equanimity. One reason was that Judge Ben K. Miller made a special effort to bar any juror who would regard the long sequestration as a genuine hardship. Says he: "I simply don't think that anyone who is angry or resentful will be an impartial juror. And there is the risk that he might taint the rest of the jury...
...oddity was that five of the jurors were under 24, all singles who had been living at home with their parents, and they naturally formed a social group. They invented a cocktail they called the "Pontiac" (Amaretto and soda with a twist of lime). They held occasional mock trials at which one of them proved adept at imitating the lawyers involved in the case. On April Fools' Day, Linda Tumino, 21, hid in the back of the sheriffs bus and caused a momentary panic among the deputies when they found themselves missing one juror. "All it was was party...