Without a Doubt - [80]

That’s why so much was riding on the jury questionnaire.

Jury selection in the Simpson case was set to begin on September 26. Ito had ordered up an unusually large pool, one thousand candidates. He clearly foresaw a long, drawn-out contest and wanted to make sure we had the bodies to cover it. The first step was elementary triage: he would call in the whole bunch and hand out a one-page screening questionnaire to determine if serving on a long case would cause them hardship.

I always hated this phase. It was during hardship questioning that a lot of the better-educated, solid-citizen types would find a way to get themselves excused from service. People with steady jobs and career commitments can’t afford to take time off, because employers won’t cover their salary for more than ten days of jury service. Once they heard the estimated trial time for a long-cause case, as many as 70 percent of them would walk right out the door. These people, the ones with with steady jobs and career commitments, are usually pro-prosecution jurors. It was so ironic. The lengthy cases were by and large the most serious ones, often death-penalty cases where you want the most intelligent jurors possible. And yet if one candidate with a college degree ever made it through hardship and the gauntlet of defense challenges, we always regarded it as a miracle.

The survivors of hardship questioning-in this case a pool of three hundred-would receive the full-blown questionnaire containing questions submitted by both the prosecution and the defense. The questions themselves had to survive a rigorous weeding-out process: both sides would submit questions and, after a lot of angry rhetoric and head-banging, the judge would decide which ones made the cut.

By the time we got to drafting questions, Bill and I had already given the questionnaire a lot of thought. Our questions had to be blunt enough to hit the hot-button issues head-on: “Have you ever been beaten by a spouse?” “Have you ever been arrested by the LAPD?” “Do you fantasize about being O. J. Simpson’s date at the Rose Bowl?” That sort of thing. They had to be tactful enough to avoid offending anyone we might have hoped to win over. They had to be sly enough to trip up anyone who was lying. Usually you’ll find people who’ll lie like crazy to avoid serving. But here we had to entertain the possibility that the opposite would occur; at least some opportunists out there might be looking to cash in on their stint in the jury box at the Trial of the Century.

After we’d spent God knows how many hours clinking glasses with Don Vinson, I expected that he would at least send us a list of questions, if not a completed questionnaire, for our review. Jo-Ellan Dimitrius, after all, did the entire thing for the Simpson team. But the deadline for submitting our draft to the court was approaching, and Vinson had sent us nothing.

“What’s he waiting for,” I groused to Bill, “an engraved invitation?”

Bill promised he’d give Vinson a nudge; I assumed he did. But days passed. Nothing came by winged messenger from DecisionQuest. What Bill finally received was one question scribbled on a piece of legal paper. I don’t even recall what it was. I do recall it was not even remotely useful.

In the end, Bill and I just had to knuckle down and do the thing the way we normally did it: by ourselves. We recruited our DV experts, Scott Gordon and Lydia Bodin, to work on domestic violence. Our DNA expert, Lisa Kahn, oversaw the science part. Everyone pitched in on the celebrity issue. Question on the table: How do you get at the issue of fame? It’s one thing to prosecute a defendant who’s notorious-someone who’s well known but not particularly well liked, like Charles Keating, or the prosecutor’s dream defendant, Charles Manson. With a flaming psychopath in the dock, all you have to do is get up and recite your Social Security number to win a conviction. This was not the case with a sympathetic figure, one idolized the way O. J. Simpson was. I didn’t know of anyone who’d ever tackled a problem of this magnitude. Somehow we’d have to get the jurors past the defendant’s public image and get them to acknowledge that all they knew about O. J. Simpson was a slick facade.

We all agreed that we should seed the questionnaire throughout with celebrity questions, some direct, others indirect. First we’d ask jurors where they got their news: TV, radio, print? A juror who got most of his news from tabloids and watching evening news magazines like Hard Copy would obviously be a problem for us. Not only would he have been fed a steady diet of misinformation, but his viewing preference might show that he had a more than average interest in the cult of celebrity itself.

Some celebrity questions suggested themselves.

“Have you ever asked a celebrity for an autograph?”

“Have you ever written to a celebrity?”

Certain questions taken together provided internal checks. If, for instance, a juror wrote that he watched news on three channels daily, and yet insisted that he had no knowledge of the Simpson case, we’d have some reason to believe that he was being less than truthful.