The Runaway Jury

According to Fitch’s research, the Wood case against Pynex was the fifty-fifth of its kind. Thirty-six had been dismissed for a multitude of reasons. Sixteen had gone to trial and ended with verdicts in favor of the tobacco companies. Two had ended in mistrials. None had been settled. Not one penny had ever been paid to a plaintiff in a cigarette case.

According to Rohr’s theory, none of the other fifty-four had been pushed by so formidable a plaintiff’s group. Never had the plaintiff been represented by lawyers with enough money to level the playing field. Fitch would admit this.

Rohr’s long-term strategy was simple, and brilliant. There were a hundred million smokers out there, not all with lung cancer but certainly a sufficient number to keep him busy until retirement. Win the first one, then sit back and wait for the stampede. Every main street harn-and-egger with a grieving widow would be calling with lung cancer cases. Rohr and his group could pick and choose.

He operated from a suite of offices which took the top three floors of an old bank building not far from the courthouse. Late Friday night, he opened the door to a dark room and stood along the back wall as Jonathan Kotlack from San Diego operated the projector. Kotlack was in charge of jury research and selection, though Rohr would do most of the questioning. The long table in the center of the room was littered with coffee cups and wadded paper. The people around the table watched bleary-eyed as another face flashed against the wall.

Nelle Robert (pronounced Roh-bair), age forty-six, divorced, once raped, works as a bank teller, doesn’t smoke, very overweight and thus disqualified under Rohr’s philosophy of jury selection. Never take fat women. He didn’t care what the jury experts would tell him. He didn’t care what Kotlack thought. Rohr never took fat women. Especially single ones. They tended to be tightfisted and unsympathetic.

He had the names and faces memorized, and he couldn’t take any more. He had studied these people until he was sick of them. He eased from the room, rubbed his eyes in the hallway, and walked down the stairs of his opulent offices to the conference room, where the Documents Committee was busy organizing thousands of papers under the supervision of Andre Durond from New Orleans. At this moment, at almost ten o’clock on Friday night, more than forty people were hard at work in the law offices of Wendall H. Rohr.

He spoke to Durond as they watched the paralegals for a few minutes. He left the room and headed for the next with a quicker pace now. The adrenaline was pumping. The tobacco lawyers were down the street working just as hard.

Nothing rivaled the thrill of big-time litigation.

Chapter Three

The main courtroom of the Biloxi courthouse was on the second floor, up the tiled staircase to an atrium where sunlight flooded in. A fresh coat of white paint had just been applied to the walls, and the floors gleamed with new wax.

By eight Monday a crowd was already gathering in the atrium outside the large wooden doors leading to the courtroom. One small group was clustered in a corner, and was comprised of young men in dark suits, all of whom looked remarkably similar. They were well groomed, with oily short hair, and most either wore horn-rimmed glasses or had suspenders showing from under their tailored jackets. They were Wall Street financial analysts, specialists in tobacco stocks, sent South to follow the early developments of Wood v. Pynex.

Another group, larger and growing by the minute, hung loosely together in the center of the atrium. Each member awkwardly held a piece of paper, a jury summons. Few knew one another, but the papers labeled them and conversation came easy. A nervous chatter rose quietly outside the courtroom. The dark suits from the first group became still and watched the potential jurors.

The third group wore frowns and uniforms and guarded the doors. No fewer than seven deputies were assigned to keep things secure on opening day. Two fiddled with the metal detector in front of the door. Two more busied themselves with paperwork behind a makeshift desk. They were expecting a full house. The other three sipped coffee from paper cups and watched the crowd grow.

The guards opened the courtroom doors at exactly eight-thirty, checked the summons of each juror, admitted them one by one through the metal detector, and told the rest of the spectators they would have to wait awhile. Same for the analysts and same for the reporters.

With a neat ring of folding chairs in the aisles around the padded benches, the courtroom could seat about three hundred people. Beyond the bar, another thirty or so would soon crowd around the counsel tables. The Circuit Clerk, popularly elected by the people, checked each summons, smiled, and even hugged a few of the jurors she knew, and in a much experienced way herded them into the pews. Her name was Gloria Lane, Circuit Clerk for Harrison County for the past eleven years. She wouldn’t dare miss this opportunity to point and direct, to put faces with names, to shake hands, to politic, to enjoy a brief moment in the spotlight of her most notorious trial yet. She was assisted by three younger women from her office, and by nine the jurors were all properly seated by number and were busy filling out another round of questionnaires.

Only two were missing. Ernest Duly was rumored to have moved to Florida, where he supposedly died, and there was not a clue to the whereabouts of Mrs. Telia Gail Ridehouser, who registered to vote in 1959 but hadn’t visited the polls since Carter beat Ford. Gloria Lane declared the two to be nonexistent. To her left, rows one through twelve held 144 prospective jurors, and to her right, rows thirteen through sixteen held the remaining 50. Gloria consulted with an armed deputy, and pursuant to Judge Harkin’s written edict, forty spectators were admitted and seated in the rear of the courtroom.

The questionnaires were finished quickly, gathered by the assistant clerks, and by ten the first of many lawyers began easing into the courtroom. They came not through the front door, but from somewhere in the back, behind the bench, where two doors led to a maze of small rooms and offices. Without exception they wore dark suits and intelligent frowns, and they all attempted the impossible feat of gawking at the jurors while trying to appear uninterested. Each tried vainly to seem preoccupied with weightier matters as files were examined and whispered conferences took place. They trickled in and took their places around the tables. To the right was the plaintiff’s table. The defense was next to it. Chairs were packed tightly into every possible inch between the tables and the wooden rail which separated them from the spectators.

Row number seventeen was empty, again Harkin’s orders, and in eighteen the boys from Wall Street sat stiffly and studied the backs of the jurors. Behind them were some reporters, then a row of local lawyers and other curious types. Rankin Fitch pretended to read a newspaper in the back row.

More lawyers filed in. Then the jury consultants from both sides took their positions in the cramped seats between the railing and the counsel tables. They began the uncomfortable task of staring into the inquiring faces of 194 strangers. The consultants studied the jurors because, first, that was what they were being paid huge sums of money to do, and second, because they claimed to be able to thoroughly analyze a person through the telltale revelations of body language. They watched and waited anxiously for arms to fold across the chest, for fingers to pick nervously at teeth, for heads to cock suspiciously to one side, for a hundred other gestures that supposedly would lay a person bare and expose the most private of prejudices.

They scribbled notes and silently probed the faces. Juror number fifty-six, Nicholas Easter, received more than his share of concerned looks. He sat in the middle of the fifth row, dressed in starched khakis and a button-down, a nice-looking young man. He glanced around occasionally, but his attention was directed at a paperback he’d brought for the day. No one else had thought to bring a book.