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THE JURY. The nearly instant decision after nine months of trial and what prosecutor Clark described as a "mountain of evidence" was the ultimate "embarrassment," in Kamisar's view. "The 12 smartest people who ever lived couldn't have sorted through the evidence and evaluated it in four hours," he declares. "I have to accept the verdict, but I don't have to respect the jury that rendered it because of their unseemly haste. They could at least have stayed in deliberations for nine hours--one hour for each of the million dollars it cost to prosecute the case."
What happened? Of its 266 days in very trying isolation, the jury spent only about half that time actually in court, the rest under virtual detention. Many knowledgeable critics are convinced that sequestration is not all it's cracked up to be. Uelmen "can't imagine" trying such a ballyhooed case as Simpson's without shielding jurors from prejudicial publicity, but he believes "we need to find some sort of middle ground" so that jurors do not end up as soul-sapped prisoners. "I think where the system is most vulnerable is the pool of people willing and able to serve," says Simpson prosecutor Brian Kelberg. "How are we going to get a surgeon or a bank president?" The potential jurors for big, sequestered cases tend to be unrepresentative: older, less educated and largely female. Moreover, sequestration is "a far cry from the foolproof system we think it is,'' says Kamisar. "Things slip through the seal"--conjugal visits, for instance.
Jury expert Abramson also believes that asking jurors to sit silently throughout a trial and not talk about a case is onerous and unreasonable. At the very least, he contends, jurors facing a welter of technicalities thrown at them without a clearly understood context should be allowed to ask questions screened by the judge. But Abramson would go further: "I favor allowing jurors to start talking [among themselves] about the one thing that's overwhelming their lives.''
THE TV CAMERA. The "self-consciousness of everyone concerned" dragged out the case, in the view of Vincent Blasi, a Columbia University law professor and courtroom-cameras advocate. Uelmen agrees that the "entertainment medium" took command: "We had witnesses who treated their testimony like a gig. We had witnesses who were afraid to testify, who were afraid of what it would do to their reputations." But, adds Uelmen, "evidence was uncovered because of television coverage. All those photos of O.J. wearing gloves at football games, for example, came from volunteers.'' Of his own experience with TV trials, Midwest lawyer Stephen Jones, counsel for Oklahoma City bombing suspect Timothy McVeigh, reports, "I only did one, and I regretted it then, and I would never repeat the same mistake. I think it's irresistible to play to the gallery." Late last week the judge who will retry Erik and Lyle Menendez on charges of murdering their parents barred cameras from those proceedings to "protect the rights of the parties, the dignity of the courts.'' Both those precious commodities, most observers agree, will need some rehabilitation after the Trial of the Century.
--Reported by Adam Cohen/Atlanta, Patrick E. Cole, Dan Cray and David S. Jackson/Los Angeles and Andrea Sachs/New York