Without a Doubt - [81]

I have to say that in this instance Lance Ito really came through for us. He gave us almost every question we asked for. Of course, he gave the defense almost everything they asked for, as well. The result was a document at least an inch thick. It was the longest questionnaire that either Bill or I had ever seen. Seventy-five pages each! I heard that when prospective jurors first saw it, they groaned. And I thought, What are you complaining about? You’re not gonna have to go through each and every one of these suckers comma by frigging comma.

One afternoon during the last week in September, a law clerk wheeled a steel cart into my office and unloaded four cardboard boxes of completed questionnaires. Three hundred of them. Bill and I just looked at each other. It was a look that said, The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. He took half. I took half. Then we burrowed into our respective offices and started to work.

The job wasn’t as simple as reading through the questionnaire once and jotting down notes. I had to flag key responses and then summarize them on a separate ten-page form that Bill and I had devised for the purpose. We’d also come up with a system for grading each juror on a scale of 1 to 5, 5 being the best. It was incredibly clumsy, but we had no precedent for a job this large.

I lost track of the time. When I finally put my pen down and looked up, it was dark outside. My God, I thought. I’d started at three o’clock in the afternoon and it was already past seven. And I’d only gotten through three of these monsters!

I walked down the empty halls to Bill’s office. To tell you the truth, I liked this place a whole lot better when it was deserted. The feeling of being alone in the office gave me a sense of freedom that I found invigorating and at the same time peaceful. But right now I was feeling low and needed bucking up.

Bill’s door was open. I could see him hunched over his desk, poring over a document tidily flagged with Post-its.

“How many have you gotten through?” I asked him dourly.

“Only two. I can’t believe it.”

“We’ve gotta find a better system,” I told him.

We heard a rustle in the hall, and just then Jonathan Fairtlough stuck his head in the door. Jonathan, a freckled young Irishman with an unruly shock of brown hair, had been one of our first picks for the team. He was full of energy, optimism, and expansive ideas for graphic presentations. Jonathan was also an electronics genius, whom we called in whenever the computers or even the copiers went on the blink. He never seemed to get tired. At least not at that point.

“Hey, boss,” he said. It was directed at both of us. “Anything I can do for you?”

“As a matter of fact,” I told him, “we’re trying to come up with a way to streamline the summaries. Any ideas?”

Jonathan thought for a moment.

“Why don’t you just dictate the important stuff into a minicassette? Then get the secretaries to type them up for you.”

Bill and I looked at each other. Out of the mouths of babes!

After that, we picked up our speed a couple of knots, but we still remained in danger of drowning beneath swells of detail. We needed some way to make the task more concrete, more visual. I recalled a system I’d had picked up from another D.A. named Pat Dixon. He’d tried a lot of long-cause cases, and he’d devised a system for jury selection. Before voir dire, he would make up a pack of yellow cardboard cards, about three inches by three, one for each juror in the pool. He’d jot down pertinent information about each one on the front. Then he’d deal the cards. Twelve of them arranged in two rows of six, a simulated jury box. This helped him to visualize what those twelve people, each with his own history and set of prejudices, might look sitting next to the others. He’d take one candidate-maybe a crotchety contrarian-and try to figure out the rating each side would give him. Then he’d try to figure out which side was likely to get him struck for cause and which would have to use a peremptory challenge. The contrarian would stay, or he’d go. Pat would do this until he had combined the cards in all their plausible permutations. Whenever I went past his office, I’d see him sitting, staring hour after hour at the cards before him, playing this game of lawyer’s solitaire.

So I made up a pack for Bill and me. Three hundred yellow cardboard cards. In the late afternoon, or whenever we had a few moments, Bill and I would meet in one of our offices and pull out the pack and start dealing. We’d add a juror to the rotation to see how he or she fit into the mix. We’d rotate the least desirable candidate out. We kept looking for the perfect ensemble. Or at least an acceptable one.

It was dismal going. Any way you shuffled the deck, this was far and away the worst pool of jurors either of us had ever seen. Few of these people had ever taken college courses, let alone gotten a degree. Many were out of work. No one had anything good to say about the LAPD. An uncomfortably large percentage of them either knew someone who had been arrested or had been arrested themselves. The Bronco chase seemed to arouse in them nothing but regret for the sufferings of the defendant. “Poor guy, gone to visit his wife’s grave and all he gets is grief from the law.” At the very worst, Simpson’s actions were seen as “bizarre.” Almost no one believed that he had been trying to escape.