Free Objection! by Nancy Grace

the infielder to sign autographs in the jury room.
    Although the accused might not be a household name, juries seem equally dazzled by wealthy defendants. In 1982, John DeLorean, the creator of the futuristic eighties sports car, the DeLorean, was charged with conspiring to smuggle $24 million of cocaine into the United States. At his 1984 trial for drug trafficking, the prosecution showed videotape of DeLorean discussing the drug deal with undercover FBI agents. The defense maintained that the government had entrapped him and that DeLorean was a man driven to desperate acts because his company was on the brink of financial ruin. A jury found him not guilty.
    History seems to be repeating itself. Before Judge Michael Obus declared a mistrial because of the perceived threats received by juror Jordan in the Tyco trial, it seemed unlikely that the jury was headed for a unanimous guilty verdict against CEO Dennis Kozlowski and CFO
    Mark Swartz. Despite mountains of evidence to support the state’s claims the executives stole $600 million from the company and spent it on, among other things, a $6,000 shower curtain and museum-quality artwork for their homes, a guilty verdict apparently wasn’t on the hori-zon. Jordan announced the prosecution had not proved criminal intent.
    The defense can only hope another enamored juror winds up as part of the jury pool in the new trial.
    Although I rail against it, the truth is, the poor and uneducated are much more likely to be treated harshly. One popular theory is that the O B J E C T I O N !
    4 9
    wealthy can afford to hire a better defense team. The other important factor is that jurors are wrongly predisposed to think that someone who is successful, white, and without a documented criminal history is less likely to commit a crime. Throw into the mix an individual on trial whom the jury believes they actually know, someone who has been in their homes many, many times—albeit on the television screen—and it’s almost impossible to get a conviction.
    The idea that any of these privileged defendants are less likely to commit wrongdoing than, say, a minority just slogging through the day like the rest of us, is simply not true. The famous, the beautiful, the well-educated, and the wealthy, with impossibly straight white teeth and sporting couture clothing at trial, are just as susceptible to greed, anger, and evildoing as anyone else. It’s just tough sometimes to convince a jury of that.
    G R E E D B Y T H E B O O K
    When Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales, he put Greed on the list of the Seven Deadly Sins. Greed has been around since time began and now it has wormed its way into the jury deliberation room. Why? Because we as a society have made it possible. Centuries ago there was no National Enquirer offering big bucks for first-person accounts from jurors and no competition-crazed TV and movie producers wooing jurors to trade information for national notoriety. There was no Dateline , no local news that could make instant celebrities out of jurors addicted to the limelight. In the not-so-distant past, jurors may have gotten some semblance of notoriety within their communities, but they couldn’t make any real money off it. Now they can, and they pose a serious threat to our justice system.
    Today’s jurors have discovered there’s money to be made by sitting in the jury box. The public’s hunger for information about high-profile trials—for the “inside story” that now must be secured at any 5 0
    N A N C Y G R A C E
    or all cost—has spawned a distinctly contemporary phenomenon that’s at the root of the problem we now face: juror greed. This disturbing new development is a many-tentacled monster. It hungrily reaches out from the courtroom steps to feed its insatiable appetite for fifteen minutes of fame and fortune, courtesy of the exposure and hefty checks offered by tabloids, television, and publishers hawking tell-all books.
    A decade ago, the “trial of the