Re: NH Advocate: Case # 76354 - Whodunit? 12 Angry Men & Women (Part 2 of 2)
12 Angry Men & Women
For days they'd been stuck. Eight jurors were convinced: Anthony Bazier had pulverized a woman to death. Four jurors were equally convinced: The state had put on such a weak case, they had no way of knowing.
They went over the same arguments, again and again. They asked to rehear all the medical evidence. They asked to rehear the snitch's testimony. They asked the judge to re-explain the definition of "reasonable doubt." The jury forewoman asked the judge to kick out the most vocal holdout against conviction.
In the end, they gave up, the second jury to fail to decide the fate of Anthony Bazier. A judge declared a mistrial on Dec. 6, 2001, the second time a jury failed to render a verdict.
A month later jurors remain scarred by the nine days they spent arguing inside a cramped fifth-floor jury room. The temperature inside the room veered from freezing to steamy. The emotional climate remained steady, at just near boiling.
At one point, it did boil over.
The lead holdout, a lawyer named Ed Mattison, brought up his personal experience as a mugging victim. He hadn't been able to identify his assailant when the cops showed him mug shots, he said. And he didn't trust the eyewitnesses in this case who identified Brazier's mug shot as that of the killer.
Mattison's chief nemesis, juror Johnny Mack Faragher, a Yale history prof, didn't want to hear that story again.
"What your point?" he blurted. "What's your point?" he repeated. "What's your point!!????!!!"
"I don't like the way you're talking to me," responded Mattison.
"I'm not here to make friends with you," Faragher shot back. "What's the point you're making? We're here to deliberate about the evidence."
That wasn't easy. The jurors faced a murder case with no physical evidence. No blood. No weapon. No fingerprints. Just four eyewitnesses. None of the eyewitnesses saw the crime take place. All but one had sordid pasts. They told conflicting stories.
Plus, the jury had its share of opinionated people accustomed to winning arguments. Four of them, incredibly, were Yale professors. Faragher specializes in the American West. Years ago, he lived right near the murder site. "We raised a family there. We used the public library. We used to go across the street to get sodas. It made me feel so bad about the decline of that neighborhood. We were big believers in the melting pot. The fact that it turned into a drug corner was so depressing."
Besides Faragher, the jury included a Yale geneticist and a retired art school dean. It included political science professor Norma Thompson, the forewoman.
A fifth juror was a medical researcher, a sixth a grad student. Then there was Mattison, a former public defender and city government attorney. He now runs an agency helping people with mental health and substance abuse problems. He's also a city alderman.
How do you end up with four Yale professors and a lawyer on one jury?
"I wanted smart jurors," says Bazier's attorney, William Bloss. Bloss figured they would "understand and apply the concept of reasonable doubt" to the lack of physical evidence and the forensics screw-ups in this case.
Three of the four professors ended up arguing for conviction. They claimed the holdouts took "reasonable doubt" too literally.
That wasn't the only surprise.
Mattison had once defended New Haven's police--back in their rough, pre-community policing days--as a city lawyer. Yet he became the jury's most vociferous critic of the police department's evidence in this csae.
The victim was white, the accused killer black. Yet the jury's only non-white member, an African-American bus driver, argued for conviction. She told the holdouts: If this guy goes free, he'll come to my neighborhood, not yours.
Joining Mattison and the geneticist in the holdout corner were a paralegal and a man who sells tires for a living.
Bloss did get his debating society. Before giving up, the jurors combed through not just the scraps of evidence in the case, but nettlesome philsophical questions about the reliability of eyewitness testimony and, above all, the parameters of "reasonable doubt."
In arguing about "reasonable doubt," the jury forewoman, Professor Thompson, thought about a William Faulkner novel, Absalom Absalom. It tells the story of an unsolved murder. "In the novel," Thompson observes, "the main character Quentin Compson attempts to reconstruct the sequence of events of decades earlier, based on fragmented and conflicting accounts of witnesses. The reader comes to see that the final script that Quentin comes up with is superior to any prior accounts because of the imaginative skills and empathy he brings to the account of each witness."
Thompson happened to be teaching Absalom Absalom to her students in a Yale humanities seminar around the time of the trial. In the jury room she made the same case as Faulkner: "that one can judge the psychological strength of one account over another, and come to a reasoned judgment about a crime which may have conflicting, questionable, or incomplete eyewitness testimony."
She pressed that argument because the two lead holdout jurors, Mattison and geneticist Michael Stern, focused on the fact that the state's four eyewitnesses described the killer four different ways. Four eyewitnesses claimed to have seen Bazier near the murder scene the day of the murder. They all described his clothes differently, including the color of his shoes and jacket, and whether he wore a hat.
Three picked his face out of mug shots. A fourth saw his face in a series of mug shots and said he wasn't the guy.
Jurors on both sides agreed that the cops had put on a weak case, in part by bumbling, in part because of the absence of physical evidence. That made the eyewitness accounts crucial. The anti-conviction jurors noted the questionable character and motives of three of the witnesses--dope-dealers and a buyer--in addition to their differing descriptions of the alleged killer's clothes. The jurors noted that the cops showed the eyewitnesses a board of mug shots in which Bazier stood out as the only face matching the general description. (See main story.)
"I don't see why you believe that people could disagree so totally about what somebody was wearing and yet that it would be clear they would be right about what the person's face looked like," remarks Mattison. "There have been so many newspaper articles and magazine stories about people who were proved by some sort of laboratory evidence not to have committed the crime, that to me it was self-evident that i.d. evidence, especially of a stranger, was a very weak read."
One juror attacked geneticist Stern for being a "scientist" who "deals with absolutes." Faragher and Thompson complained that Mattison and Stern could never convict anybody under their criteria for certainty.
Faragher cites his experience as a historian to explain his position.
"I'm a historian. I evaluate evidence all the time. In a situation like that, it's not surprising that different witnesses would testify to different details ... There was a man in the backyard. There was a murder that took place. Three people saw him. They all agreed he was big, he was black, he had a beard. They disagreed on what color was his jacket, what color are his shoes. But the three people picked the same man in the mug shots. That is compelling evidence to me."
As for the fourth witness who didn't identify Bazier's mug shot as the alleged killer's? "That witness did not pick another man," Faragher reasons.
"Clothing is a very unimportant description. The face is the thing. That is what human beings focus on. That is what they remember," argues Thompson.
She adds that "there are limits" to which an eyewitness' criminal history should discredit testimony. "The reason there were witnesses at all was because the drug deal interrupted what seemed to be an attempted rape," she argues. "We have nobody else."
Finally the jurors asked Judge Ronald Fracasse to spell out in writing the meaning of "reasonable doubt." Instead he offered his definition orally. He definied it as a doubt that would cause a juror to hestitate to to act in a serious matter affecting his own life. That didn't settle the argument. The two sides were too far apart.
When they gave up, Thompson says, she felt the need to allow jurors to uncork their frustrations.
"He'll kill again. And that victim's blood will be on your hands," one juror told Mattison.
"I don't think this is the guy who did it," he responded.
Thompson and Faragher say they remain convinced Bazier committed the murder. After the jury's dismissal, Faragher "went home and was sick for 10 days. I had an undefinable virus."
Mattison and Stern remain convinced there's no way to tell based on the evidence.
"People had just the most intense need to have someone be held responsible. The notion that somebody could get away with such a terrible thing was utterly unacceptable," reflects Mattison. He finds it "frightening that a person would be convicted on such thin evidence. Any of us could be the victim of being thought to resemble someone who committed a crime."
Thompson has sent a 15-question survey to her fellow jurors, because she was writing a book on the trial. She asked permission to quote their jury room remarks in her book. Stern responded no. "I do not believe that you can or will honestly, accurately or fairly represent the views of the minority opinion jurors."
Thompson says she'll leave Stern's name out but will quote his remarks, because she took notes. "These were their words."
Thompson hasn't found a publisher for her book yet. She has started working on it, anyway. She has a bestseller in the works, she says--she's convinced. Tenative title: Unreasonable Doubt.
Paul Bass can be reached at pbass@newhavenadvocate.com.
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