Why The Jury Freed Simpson -- Juror Calls State's Case `Garbage In, Garbage Out'

LOS ANGELES - In the end, what swayed them wasn't the impassioned rhetoric of Johnnie Cochran, or the calmer but no less dramatic appeals of Marcia Clark.

They didn't buy the prosecution's so-called "mountains" of evidence, from a barking dog to DNA. They didn't buy the motive, a husband exploding in jealous, murderous rage.

At least one juror tearfully told her daughter afterward that Simpson may have committed the murders, but she distrusted Mark Fuhrman's critical testimony.

And the race card, played so brazenly in the defense team's blistering attacks on Los Angeles Police Detective Mark Fuhrman, rated "barely a blip" for the most part on their mental radar screens.

In the end, said Lionel Cryer - the juror who will long be remembered for his raised-fist salute of O.J. Simpson at the close of the fractious and unpredictable murder trial - what mattered was what wasn't there, the holes he said jurors kept finding in the prosecution case.

"It was garbage in, garbage out," Cryer, known as the juror in seat No. 6, said yesterday about the prosecution's evidence. "There was a problem with what was being presented to (prosecutors) for testing from LAPD. We felt there were a lot of opportunities for either contamination of evidence, samples being mixed or stored together."

That summed up the panel's "whole mode of thinking" very soon after the 10 women and two men entered the deliberations room Monday morning, Cryer said. As they walked into that room on the ninth floor of the downtown courthouse, Cryer said, the words of noted forensic pathologist Dr. Henry Lee, whom Cryer said the jury viewed as "the most credible witness" of all, reverberated in their heads.

Lee, Cryer recounted, said, "There is something wrong here."

"He had a lot of impact on a lot of people. A lot of people were in agreement that there was something wrong" with the prosecution's case, he said.

Most jurors tried to do a fast vanishing act, only to discover that their homes - in communities including mid-city Los Angeles, Bellflower and Boyle Heights - had been staked out by media hordes.

But Cryer, 44, a telephone-company marketing representative, decided to speak out, painting a picture of a panel that deliberated for the most part without acrimony or the racial tensions that many pundits had feared would tear them apart.

He claims the 12 panelists began deliberations ignorant of each other's views.

"A lot of people thought we already had our minds made up," he said. "That was definitely not the case."

But, Cryer said, the determination that they were near agreement came barely half an hour into their discussions.

The morning began with the court clerk, Deirdre Robertson, rolling in a cart laden with the scores of exhibits that had been paraded before the panel over the past nine months.

Looking at that cart, Cryer recalled thinking, "This is going to take a long time."

But by 10 a.m., less than an hour after they had begun, they elected to take a straw vote. The secret ballots, collected in a jar, tallied "10-2, not guilty," he said. He still doesn't know who the two were. The discussion then narrowed to one theme: inconsistencies in the prosecution case.

The panel was troubled by the marking of evidence and the order of its introduction. "There were erasures on reports," he said. "We felt that there were some problems . . . that they were trying to cover their rear ends by making changes in reports."

He theorized that the LAPD "had such a bad track record with their high-profile cases in the past that they pounced on this case to try to not blow it at all costs. No matter what, we're going to make this case."

They also questioned why Detective Phillip Vannatter would carry a vial of blood taken from Simpson from Parker Center back to Brentwood.

The bloody glove found at Rockingham was the one piece of evidence Cryer himself "couldn't get past," he said, adding that he had serious questions about where it was found "and the fact that there was no other blood in that area at all."

The prosecution's contention that Simpson's rage and his need to control his ex-wife were the motives for murder was unconvincing to jurors, Cryer said.

"I don't want to come off as being insensitive about brutality against women," he said, but prosecutors only presented one instance where Simpson physically abused his former wife. "The 1989 incident was significant for all of us because from '89 until her death, there were no other incidents where he touched her."

Quickly, they agreed that they needed to re-examine the testimony of Allan Park, the conscientious limousine driver who kept checking his watch and looking for signs of his passenger, Simpson, whom he was to drive from the former athlete's Brentwood estate to the airport.

Cryer said there were four points the panel wanted to doublecheck: how many cars Park said were in the driveway, how definitive was his memory of whether the infamous white Bronco was parked at the curb, what the dark figure Park said he saw entering the mansion was wearing, and where exactly Park spotted him.

The jurors' discussions were "excited" but not hostile, Cryer said. They soon concluded that Park was mistaken about how many cars were in the driveway, that he may have been influenced by photographs that had been taken later.

"There were a lot of photographs showing Arnelle's car in the driveway. But it was not there that night," he said, recalling her testimony. He said jurors wanted Park's testimony that he had seen two cars read back because they did not recall those statements. That discrepancy called all of Park's testimony into question, he said.

After the Park testimony was re-read in open court, they immediately took a second vote - at about 2:30 p.m. "That was the decisive vote," he said. "I didn't think we would all come together on the same mindset so quickly."

As the jury left Judge Lance Ito's courtroom yesterday morning, Cryer thrust a clenched left fist into the air. "It was like a `Right on' to you, Mr. Simpson," he said. "Get on with your life. Get your kids. Be happy. Get some closure in your life."

The strongest statement in support of the prosecution came from the older of the two white jurors. Cryer remembers her saying, "I really think he could possibly have done it. But I'm not sure."

In an ABC news interview, the daughter of Anise Aschenbach, the older white juror, said Fuhrman played a strong role in her mother's decision to acquit.

Aschenbach called the daughter at her Paramount home during the interview, crying about the outcome of the case.

"She told me, `I think he probably did do it, but what happened was that the evidence was not there, mainly because of Fuhrman,' " said the daughter, who asked to be identified only by her first name, Denise. "She's real shook up and she's real upset. . . . I felt she was so upset about what had to be done . . . this was the only answer they could come up with because the involvement with Fuhrman in the case somehow screwed up the evidence."

Still, the jury was united at the end. Cryer said he hoped their stunning dismissal of the prosecution case has not sent the wrong message to the victims' families.

"I hope that our verdict does not in any way reflect that we have any lack of concern or remorse or care for the families of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman. I know my heartfelt sympathy goes out to them tremendously, and I understand that nothing I could ever say would ever (relieve) the pain and the grief that this whole incident has caused in their lives."

Neither should the panel's swift acquittal of Simpson be taken as a sign the jurors rushed to judgment, suggested another juror.

"We've been there nine months. That's enough," Brenda Moran, 45, a computer technician known as Juror No. 7, said when asked why they made up their minds so fast.

Flanked by her mother and brother, the haggard-looking Moran slipped into her parents' Compton-area house at half past noon yesterday, greeted by the excited shouts of neighbors.

"I think we did the right thing, and I'm really glad to be back home," she said, just before disappearing into the house for a reunion with her family and her first home-cooked meal in almost a year.

They were survivors, the 12 jurors who scattered from the downtown courthouse, leaving word with Ito that they did not wish to talk with reporters or the lawyers on either side of the notorious case.

The family of one juror, a Compton postal worker, said her husband picked her up from the courthouse and headed straight out of town. The juror called her mother yesterday afternoon, saying she was "on the run right now" and would see her when the hubbub has died down.

Outside the Bellflower apartment of another juror, neighbors, drawn out of their homes by the crush of reporters, marveled to learn they had a connection to the Simpson trial. Women brought their babies and small children to watch and wait with the media for a glimpse of the returning juror, even after a family friend announced she would not be coming home.

But the forewoman herself was nowhere to be seen. Her daughter rebuffed all entreaties. "I'm just very happy to have my mother coming home. It's been a long haul," the young woman dressed in a white linen suit and sandals said before police assigned to protect her and her mother whisked her away. "I'm going to hug her and kiss her and welcome her home."

Cryer said the many delays when jurors were left in their hotels while lawyers argued various motions in court were "horrible. The attorneys, the judge, the sheriffs, the reporters - everybody in that courtroom, they all got to go home at night. We went back to that hotel room."

He said he believed sequestration could have played a role in the speed with which they reached a verdict.

"You've got to remember, nine months and people are just agonizing about when is it going to be over. We want to get out of here." He described sequestration as being in a high priced jail.

"Worse than that, there are probably some things inmates can do or have access to that we didn't: read a newspaper, watch television, listen to the radio."

He said he never knew sequestration was "going to be such an intense situation," but he credited the deputies who oversaw them as being "damned good guys and ladies."